


I Am With You

by dirigibleplumbing



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: "you gave me a home", Arnie Roth & Steve Rogers Friendship, Artist Steve Rogers, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bisexual Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Canon Divergent, Dating, Depression, Depression Recovery, Domestic Avengers, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Keepsakes, Letters, Letters and emails, M/M, Mementos, Minor Jane Foster/Thor, Natasha Romanoff & Steve Rogers Friendship, New York City, Oblivious Tony Stark, POV Steve Rogers, Partially epistolary, Pining Steve Rogers, Slow Burn, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Team as Family, Two Truths and A Lie, blink and you'll miss it past Tony/Ty, genderfluid Loki (mentioned), ignores Agents of SHIELD canon, ignores Tony/Pepper, past Bucky Barnes/original character(s), past Steve Rogers/original character(s), scrapbooking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-05 07:51:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15166046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirigibleplumbing/pseuds/dirigibleplumbing
Summary: After moving into Avengers Tower, Steve has different ways of connecting with his past and figuring out his present. He writes letters to Bucky, he visits Peggy, and he writes to a Peggy who no longer exists. One day his box of mementos from the 30’s and 40’s appears by his door, all the better to help him remember good times in his life. Meanwhile, his team keeps seeking him out to spend time with him outside of missions—especially Tony Stark.Steve works to reconcile his memories of the past with his life in the present, to figure out what he wants, what makes him happy, and how he can help make the people he’s coming to care for happy, too.





	I Am With You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [XtaticPearl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/gifts).



> Title is from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
> 
> Based primarily on this prompt:
> 
>  
> 
> _Steve used to keep a memento box before the plane crash. It had things he found significant, memories to keep of people he met and liked. After being discovered, he doesn't complain about having lost it but a few months later, he finds it wrapped and left outside his room._
> 
>  
> 
> I picked this one in part because it kind of stumped me. I hope it’s something like what you had in mind, XtaticPearl!
> 
> Thank you to the brilliant [dasyatidae](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dasyatidae/pseuds/dasyatidae) for beta, and to my friend Anna, who helped me figure out how this whole research thing works. More about my resources in endnotes.
> 
> Any historical inaccuracies are my own errors. If you find any historical, geographical, continuity, or similar errors that can be fixed in 5 minutes or less, please tell me. If not, then this is an AU where whatever I wrote makes sense / is correct, okay? Okay.
> 
> For the timeline of this fic, the events of _Avengers_ happened around the same time that the movie came out (May 2012). Not long after that, all the Avengers moved into Avengers Tower (Thor doing so a few months later than the others due to a stint in Asgard). _Iron Man 3, Thor: Dark World,_ and _Age of Ultron_ don’t happen in this universe.
> 
>  _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ does happen during the course of this fic, though it takes place earlier than it does on the official MCU timeline. 
> 
> I am, however, using the official MCU timeline for when Steve was found by SHIELD: October 5, 2011, leading to October 8 being his first day awake (when he ran into Times Square).
> 
> I watch Agents of SHIELD but don’t know it well enough to write it, and incorporating Coulson and his team would have made this too unwieldy for me, so for this story I’ve just ignored Agents of SHIELD canon. I like to imagine that Coulson is alive—without the aid of Project TAHITI though, he was just, somehow, totally fine—and doing awesome things with his team. (These awesome things involve kicking their enemies’ asses so often and so thoroughly that it’s really quite boring, and no one is hurt or betrayed or kidnapped or tortured.)

“JARVIS, window tint to zero percent.”

Steve’s brain startled at the unexpected voice, which was immediately followed by the sudden reappearance of the New York skyline in front of him. The blankness of the blocked out windows was replaced by the velvet-black night sky and the glittering jewels of honey-yellow and coral-colored lights. From this high up, with the clouds and the darkness of night leveling everything out, there was little sign of the battle against the Chitauri that had ravaged the city only a few weeks earlier.

“Oh. Hey Cap.” Steve turned to see Stark, dressed in boxers and a disintegrating t-shirt, blinking at him with heavy, sleepy eyes. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your brooding. Unless you don’t mind the company?”

“Make yourself at home,” Steve managed. He minded it very much, in fact, but it was Stark’s building. It was his living room, with the pristine white floors and the couches with no upper back support. His floor-to-ceiling windows that stretched across the entire length of the room in a single unending pane of glass and towered to a height several times that of a normal room. Only Tony Stark would have picked that chandelier, which was the size of an infantry tank. It was Steve who was intruding.

Stark rubbed his eyes and slung himself onto a couch facing the sparkling view of midtown, leaving two armrests and several feet of upholstery between them. Close enough to Steve to carry on a conversation, but not quite in his space.

Steve braced himself for the onslaught of words he knew was coming. The teasing about sitting in the dark, facing windows tinted so he may as well have been staring at a wall. An interrogation about why he was out here, alone, at three in the morning.

But it didn’t come. Instead, Stark slouched into the cushions in near silence, his eyes darting over the buildings, taking in the cascade of rectangles, glass, and light before them. One hand clenched and unclenched around a pillow while another tapped out a frantic beat on the glowing blue reactor in his chest. His knee bobbed nervously. Occasionally he would still, only to start up again. After a quarter of an hour or so, though, the tapping and bobbing slowed, along with the rhythm of his breath.

It was Steve who felt compelled to speak, though his gaze never left the cityscape before them. “Sometimes I think the strangest thing is that so many things haven't changed.”

“Yeah?” Stark said, tilting his head only a little to angle it toward Steve. His voice was ragged and low with fatigue. “Like what?”

Steve shrugged and tried to rearrange himself so the couch was actually propping him up. “Rice Krispies. Chain link fences. The way the subway smells. How it’s never totally quiet or dark or empty anywhere.”

“Rice Krispies, huh?” Steve could hear the smile in Stark’s voice.

“Well,” Steve admitted. “Maybe those aren’t the ones that are the strangest to think about. The Brooklyn Bridge looks the same, you know. The Williamsburg Bridge, too. And more of the buildings than you’d think. The street signs carved into the corners, the tile designs in some of the subway stations, and the old manhole covers. That kind of thing.”

“Hmm.” Stark rested his head against the back of the couch. “Good strange, or bad strange?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Is it good to look at something and think for a second that it’s 1945 still?” Steve swallowed. Was it better to constantly remind himself of what he had lost? Or was that like forgetting them, forgetting who he had been? Or was holding onto the things that hadn’t changed just a way of fooling himself?

“Could be comforting,” Stark said after a moment.

“People haven’t changed, though.”

Stark turned his head and shoulders all the way to look right at Steve, then. “I think people changing is my favorite thing about people.”

“No, I meant…” Steve bit his lip, thinking. “Mine too, actually.” Steve tried not to squirm under Stark’s unwavering scrutiny. “I meant, the way people are, the way humans are, is the same. People are still trying to find a place for themselves, to figure things out, to do the right thing.”

“Not all of them,” Stark said, turning back to the window.

“Not all of them are doing it the way I would,” Steve corrected. “Or the way I’d want them to. But they’re trying, I think.”

“You have a lot of faith in people for someone who’s lost everything.” He said it quietly, like he was hoping Steve wouldn’t hear.

“Not in humanity, exactly—I know about the capacity some people have to hurt others, even through inaction or passivity. But individuals—yeah, I believe in individuals.”

Stark’s mouth worked, like he was chewing on the inside of his cheek. “I’ve never been to the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said after a moment. “I mean, I’ve been on it, probably. But I haven’t, you know. Visited.”

“You can see the 59th Street bridge from here.” Steve pointed. “That’s pretty much the same too.”

Somehow, Steve ended up talking even more. He didn’t ask Stark what he was doing up in the middle of the night, tapping his foot and kneading at pillows and clutching at himself. Stark didn’t mention the time, either. Instead, Steve talked about taking the trolley across the Manhattan Bridge, a story Bucky had told him about the headless ghost of a construction worker who haunted the Brooklyn Bridge, a memory an elderly neighbor had shared with him about P. T. Barnum walking his troop of elephants across Brooklyn Bridge when it first opened.

“He hated Barnum,” Steve went on, knowing he usually felt far more self-conscious when talking so much but pressing on anyway. “He didn’t think elephants should be locked up and used like that.” Stark asked him about animal rights, then, and Steve ended up telling him about the woman who lived in the big gingerbread house on the Shore Road when he’d been a kid, the one who’d kept a gorilla, several dogs, a dozen chimpanzees, and more cats than he could count. “Her yard was always filled with hummingbirds, too,” he remembered. Somehow that turned into explaining the rules of ringalevio, the city-wide hide-and-seek game from his childhood. Steve hadn’t been much use to his team, with his health how it was back then, but Bucky had insisted he play anyway. He’d done alright when it was their team’s turn to hide, since he could fit in places the other kids their age couldn’t, and if he had enough time he could eventually make it up a fire escape to the choicest hiding spots on roofs.

Steve drifted off at some point, he wasn’t sure for how long. When he awoke he was alone in the living room again, the three-story-high ceiling looming dimly above him, the windows once again tinted to obscure the skyline beyond. Beside him on the couch was a torn off corner of paper that read, in blocky print, _Thanks for the company. Sweet dreams._

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

A guy’s probably gotta be a special type of ungrateful to be living rent-free in a billion-dollar skyscraper (billion, can you believe it?) with a view of the Chrysler Building and still wish he was back in a tenement with a broken-down fire escape and an air shaft full of trash. Guess I always knew I was special, huh.

Why aren’t you here to knock some sense into me, anyway?

 

Thinking of you,

Steve

 

_________

 

Steve was glad he’d gone down to the lobby by himself, because if any of his teammates had joined him, he probably wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from saying out loud one of the rude things he was thinking about the new sculpture installation.

That’s how Stark had described it, when he told the team about it. That’s what it was called now, when an art piece was set up in a particular place. Because of course, after 70 years, the nomenclature just for _talking_ about art had changed, so he couldn’t even have a conversation about it without stumbling all over himself.

There were 5 marble statues in the center of the visitor’s lobby of Avengers Tower, the smallest of them at least 10 feet tall. The style was classical—which meant, at least, that Steve had some frame of reference for it, though he hadn’t ever really expected to see himself carved out of marble like a Hellenistic demigod. Not that it was just him. Beside the statue of him was one of Thor, tendons rendered in loving detail, Mjolnir glowing in the tendrils of early summer sun that flooded the lobby. Behind them, Natasha was caught mid-spin, one leg extended with a dancer’s grace, while Clint aimed an arrow at nothing and the Hulk threw back his head in a silent roar. The sculptor was clearly a fan of the Greek wet drapery style, judging from the care and precision of every billow of Thor’s cape and the way the sculpted fabrics clung to the figures’ frames. The poses, too, were epic, cinematic; it reminded him of _Laocoön and His Sons_ , all angst and rippling biceps and blank, pinprick stares.

The technical skill involved was certainly impressive, that was for sure. But. Steve hated it. He hated how the statue of him stood at the front, one arm peeling back with a clenched fist, read to strike, shoulders hunched as he lifted his shield in the other. He hated the way the sun hit it at that moment, like a spotlight from the universe. He hated how steady and sure the statue looked, how its shoulders were nearly broader than Thor’s, how as large as Steve was now, someone along the line had thought he should be even bigger, should be chiseled from stone and set at the front of a group of heroes like he had any clue what he was doing.

Most of all he hated how, after everything, there wasn’t even one of Iron Man. Iron Man, who had saved the whole city, not thinking he’d ever see it again.

Steve sighed and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he finally saw the 6th statue.

Suspended—God knew how—from the ceiling, some three stories above the others, was a marble suit of armor. The light streaming through the walls of glass nearly washed out the white figure against the white ceiling, but there he was, shooting straight up toward the rest of the tower, faceplate tilted upward toward a future Steve couldn’t see. Without the light of the repulsors or the saturated gleam of metal, it looked dead. Ghostly. Like the power had gone out and any second now it would come falling, falling, falling. And all over again, Steve wouldn’t be able to reach, to get there in time, to stop the impact.

Steve joined the team for dinner that night, because he was supposed to. Someone had ordered pizza, and he felt more relief than he wanted to at the prospect of food he recognized and wouldn’t embarrass himself trying to eat.

“What’d you all think of the new installation?” Stark asked, flicking one finger at a time into his mouth so he could lick the marinara off each one with rapid flicks of his tongue.

“Made my ass look great,” Clint said, pulling a slice off a new pie and then sliding the entire rest of it onto his plate, leaving the single slice on its own in the box.

“I campaigned for yours to be you in a lab coat, Brucie,” Stark said, his mouth quirking in Bruce’s direction in something like a grimace. “I was outvoted.”

“It’s fine, Tony,” Bruce said, carefully pushing a wayward pepper back onto his slice. “Might be kind of embarrassing being made out of marble, anyway,” he muttered. “Better Hulk than me for that one.”

“Can’t say I’m used to being in the spotlight much myself,” Natasha said.

Then everyone was looking at Steve. Right. He was the only one who hadn’t said something. Bruce’s eyes darted away quickly, back to his plate. Stark, on the other hand, pinned him with a gaze that made Steve want to squirm. Natasha had a small, encouraging smile playing around her lips, and Clint took in a breath, probably to say something to cover the ever lengthening silence.

“Thor would love it,” Steve said finally. That much he was sure of. Thor struck him as the kind of guy who was not only used to having statues built of him but probably expected it.

The grin that broke across Stark’s face was slow and broad and more rewarding than it had any right to be. “Yeah,” he agreed. “He would.”

“Where did the idea for the sculptures come from?” Natasha asked. Everyone else turned their attention back to their food, and Steve exhaled in relief.

Stark’s face became somehow even brighter. “Oh, you didn’t know? That’s the best part!”

“You mean you didn’t just commission them as an excuse to see yourself carved out of marble?” Clint asked from under the table. Steve tried not to notice that Clint was gobbling a slice that had landed face-down on the floor.

“This kid, Roxanne Singh, she’s an art student at Cooper Union, she sent out this proposal for a piece to commemorate the battle of New York. She just needed the funding, so.” Stark shrugged.

“How’d you see the proposal?” Steve asked. He was pretty familiar with government grants for making public art projects, but this didn’t seem like that kind of thing, especially if Stark ended up paying for it and having it in his own tower.

Stark waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s just this scholarship thing Pep and I set up for kids of immigrants who want to make art. We get all sorts of stuff, usually it’s way over my head—performance and concept art and that bullshit. Or,” he added quickly, seeing Natasha’s quirked eyebrow and Steve’s frown. “Not bullshit. Pepper and my team of art experts assure me it’s all very cutting-edge and experimental and educational. Anyway, she passed this one onto me, and we made it happen in the tower.”

It wouldn’t have struck Steve as the sort of thing Stark was interested in at all. The man was involved in hundreds of charities, he figured, far more than he could keep track of himself. This one must be special to him somehow, since he knew so much about it and even saw some of the applications.

Now that he knew something about the artist, that her parents were immigrants, that it had been her idea to make a piece about the Avengers instead of her just doing it as a job, he saw the installation in a new light. It still made him tired to think that that’s how people saw him, or wanted or needed to see him: built like a literal god, idealized and carved from stone. But, if it could bring someone—even just the artist who made it—some joy and hope, that was something.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

I hope wherever you are, you aren’t having those dreams about Zola any more.

I don’t think I’d wish nightmares about war on my worst enemy.

 

Sweet dreams, Buck.

Steve

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

I’d wish them on myself, though. And what does that say about me, huh? Because I keep hoping I’ll dream about it again. ‘Cause even if you’re falling and screaming and I can’t reach you, at least I get to see you again.

I’m not supposed to be this weak, not any more. What would you say if you were here? I can’t stop wondering. I can’t stop thinking I should know.

 

Steve

 

_________

 

Steve stared at the door. Jumping out of an airplane seemed easier than this. Everyone else was waiting for him. If he didn’t go out there soon, someone would come and knock on his door. He’d have to open it and make up a reason he hadn’t joined them yet, and everyone would know something was wrong with him and give him those pitying looks. Maybe they’d know if he went out there anyway. They could probably tell just by looking at him that he hadn’t slept properly in days, and then they’d look at him some more. Or maybe they’d look at each other with knowing glances and expect him to say something about _that_ , and it was too much.

Sure, he didn’t want to. He didn’t know what to say to them, and he didn’t want to sit there like a lump and be teased and prodded at while everyone else had a good time. But he didn’t want to do much of anything, so that wasn’t a significant measure of anything, really, and what did it matter anyway? He was going to go.

He thought then of Simon, a young man he’d stepped out with for a few months when he’d still been in college. They’d met at a drag ball in Harlem, the sort of thing Steve’s friend Arnie Roth was always talking up as a great way to meet men. That night he’d been right. Simon wasn’t like anyone Steve had been with before, or even spent much time with: well-off and based in Manhattan, with money to spare. They’d split up, Steve remembered, because of a fight about President Roosevelt.

For their second date he’d taken Steve to dinner at the St. George Hotel. Bucky had helped Steve pick an outfit and had talked his ear off with advice about how to act, how to flirt, and how to show Simon a good time without raising eyebrows from anyone else. Then Steve had gone off on the trolley by himself toward the tallest, most luxurious building for miles around. He’d arrived twenty minutes early, so nervous he’d almost made himself sick. He was thinking of bolting when Simon finally showed and flashed him a brilliant smile.

He’d been anxious then, too, but it hadn’t stopped him or even slowed him down. Now his life was like something out of War of the Worlds but just as real as everyone had thought it was the night it’d broadcast, and he lived in the tallest tower in the whole city with one of the richest men in the world. And he was afraid to, what, go spend an evening with his teammates? No, not afraid. It was inertia. Paralysis. He wasn’t frightened, it was just that his limbs wouldn’t obey his commands. He was still staring at the door, as if it might open and draw him toward it without him needing to extend any effort.

God, what was wrong with him? It wasn’t a battle, it wasn’t life or death, it wasn’t the end of the world. It was just his teammates. It would be rude to keep them waiting, ruder still to not show up at all, and there wasn’t even any good reason not to open the door, go out there, and join them.

He opened the door and walked toward the big living room JARVIS had indicated. This one had windows facing west and glassy black floors instead of glassy white ones. Every step he took closer to it, the more the hall seemed to expand impossibly in front of him, a gaping gash of metal and glass and polished surfaces.

It was just a room, Steve reminded himself. It was team bonding, they could use more of that. It should have been him who’d suggested it, really. He tried to pick up his pace.

“You’re just in time, Cap,” Stark called from behind the bar, his bustling form backlit by the bright lamps built into the wall of bottles.

“Clint was just about to drink your beer,” Natasha said, taking a sip of her own.

Clint sat perched on the back of a sleek gray couch, looking unrepentant. He shrugged. “You don’t even drink yours.”

“Wouldn’t want it to go to waste,” Steve agreed, easing into a boxy armchair with a low-slung back.

Bruce’s eyes flicked between Steve and the bar. “It’s from this, uh, little brewery in Brooklyn. In Bay Ridge.”

Oh. So it wasn’t just Steve’s beer because everyone else had had some and there was only one left. It was Steve’s beer because someone had gotten it for him, special, a piece of his childhood neighborhood. Which was now home to a brewery, of all things. Judging by the way Bruce kept glancing at Stark, who was studiously crafting a martini without meeting anyone’s eyes, it was probably Stark who’d picked it.

Steve tried on a smile that didn’t fit his face. “Well I gotta try it, in that case,” he said. “C’mon Barton, it’s not like you don’t have a 6-pack of your own in the kitchen.”

“Aw,” Clint said, making an exaggerated disappointed face and handing Steve the glass bottle. “Captain Nosypants is tracking our groceries, you guys.”

Steve settled back in the chair and took a sip. It tasted…like beer. He’d never had much of a taste for it; first he’d been sick and would’ve sooner spent any extra money he’d had on new paintbrushes or fuel for the heater, and after that he’d had more important things to worry about and it wouldn’t’ve done much of anything anyway. “Good stuff,” he said, just to say something. “What are we playing?”

It turned out to be a game Bruce had learned in India, played on a colorful fabric cross, covered in embroidered squares. He unrolled it over the gleaming black coffee table and started explaining the rules. The 5 of them split awkwardly into 4 teams—with Natasha claiming that having Clint on hers was a handicap so the playing field was still as even as it could possibly be—and began moving their pieces around the board.

The evening went a lot like trying the beer had. It was fine, as those things went. He could imagine how someone could enjoy it. Someone who wasn’t him, someone who wanted to be there.

But. He _was_ there. He’d left his room and drunk his beer and smiled. He hadn’t even been late.

When the game was over, Bruce was asleep with his head resting on the slender arm of his chair, and Clint was giving a rambling, slurred speech about brewer’s yeast. Steve and Natasha cleared up the game and sorted the bottles and glasses while Stark fussed and insisted they not bother.

Before he left, Steve swiped one of the little cowry shells that were used as dice. Bruce had dozens of extras, and Steve liked the feel of the smooth shell under his fingers. Maybe the next time he was stuck, frozen, staring at the inside of his door, it could remind him of a time things had ended up alright.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Today I learned that some people refuse to give their kids measles vaccines. Can you believe it? They can prevent it and they just don’t. Dr. Banner tried to explain it to me, but it sounded like a lot of shit, if you ask me.

It was sort of nice to be angry about it though. That’s terrible, isn’t it?

It was over a hundred degrees in the city today. Everyone keeps repeating to me that that’s not how climate change works—like I’m some kind of idiot or something—but I swear it didn’t used to get this hot before. Stark said all the smog and the pavement traps the heat, or something, and that it’s nicer outside the city where there are plants and things.

I didn’t even have to go outside and deal with it, which is something. The whole tower is full of this cold dry air. I just used the treadmill in the gym. Running without getting anywhere seems about right anyway.

Remember having to drag a mattress out onto the fire escape ‘cause if you stayed inside to sleep your skin would just about melt off of you? The tower doesn’t have fire escapes. I don’t think the windows in my rooms even open. There are special emergency staircases now instead. It’s probably all flame retardant, anyway, or maybe Stark has robots that come out and spray the building down if anything catches fire. Or maybe nothing catches on fire in the future. No one smokes anymore, isn’t that weird? That probably stops a few fires, I guess.

I didn’t used to miss the taste of asthma cigarettes. After I first stopped needing them, I mean. Well, no one needed them, apparently, turns out they weren’t really doing much good, but you know what I mean. After I stopped having asthma. It’s probably not the taste that I really miss.

I don’t think I can get lung cancer or throat cancer or anything, but smoking a cigarette alone sounds like just about the worst thing I can think of right now.

My imagination must not be working right, because I know I’ve seen a few things more terrible than that.

Right now, for example. I’m trying to imagine that you’re here in the future with me, and it’s not working right. I can’t figure out what you’d think of it. It’s like the World Exposition of Tomorrow and a grenade exploding all at once. I dunno what’s wrong with me but I just can’t figure out if you’d even like it or not.

 

Steve

 

_________

 

“I should have known you were a Cancer,” Clint said, passing Steve a box wrapped in metallic blue paper.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “Is this another one of your stupid circus things?”

“Hey, lots of people believe in astrology! It’s an ancient and respected science!” Clint protested.

“Not a science, Merida,” Stark said, watching Steve carefully unwrap Clint’s gift. The sky was a creamy, darkening gray through the wall of windows. The shiny wrapping paper glinted under the huge starburst light fixture above the circle of couches where they’d congregated to celebrate Steve’s birthday.

“Cancers are determined, loyal, headstrong, artsy, homebodies—” Clint started listing.

“I think you mean stubborn and boring,” Steve interrupted. “But I’ll keep you in mind if I ever need help setting up a dating profile.”

“No one’s servers are near good enough to handle you doing online dating,” Stark put in. “You’d break the internet.”

Steve finished removing the paper and slid a finger between the slabs of cardboard to snap the tape that held them shut. He flipped it open to find an empty picture frame made of a dull, silver metal, the right size for a medium-sized print of a photo.

“Your apartment is depressing,” Clint said by way of explanation. Natasha elbowed him in the ribs.

“Thank you,” Steve said automatically. “It’s beautiful.” It was quite nice looking, actually. Simple, unobtrusive. He didn’t have anything to put in it, but he’d think of something.

The last birthday Steve celebrated had been his 26th, and Peggy had been on assignment with the Commandos near Cherbourg. She’d brought him the newest Agatha Christie novel from across the English Channel. Bucky had made him a pair of socks; he’d learned knitting from an army pamphlet meant for convalescing soldiers, saying he found it relaxing. A pair of cattle farmers offered the team hospitality for the night, which included a feast of mussels, fresh-baked bread with camembert, and a rice pudding caramelized and crispy from hours in the oven. They’d drunk apple cider, and Morita had fixed the farm’s water pump, and then they’d all spent the night sleeping in a pile on the kitchen floor, enjoying the rare moment of calm and plenty.

Steve opened Natasha’s gift next. It was for his apartment, too; a set of delicate, fragile-looking wine glasses with a circlet of gold around each rim. “For when you want to entertain one of your online dates,” she said with a small, lopsided smile.

Bruce had gotten him a kettle, a bright, stainless steel one that sat on a stovetop and whistled when the water boiled. “You said you never notice when the water in your electric one is done,” he said, shrugging a little.

All that was left was the big tube-shaped gift wrapped in crimson paper. A scrap of gold foil taped to one end said, in block letters, “TO CAP, FROM TONY.”

“Stark, did you get him a dildo?” Clint asked as Steve peeled away a bit of the tape holding the paper in place.

“If you think that’s a standard dildo length, maybe you should’ve pursued a freakshow or porn career instead of becoming a carnival marksman,” Stark replied easily.

Steve unrolled the paper slowly, not sure of what he’d find.

It was one of the WPA posters he’d worked on. One he’d designed, actually. He remembered crawling out of his kitchen window with his sketchbook and climbing the fire escape all the way to the roof so he could sketch the buildings for the cityscape. The Brooklyn skyline had seemed so vast and wondrous then—and now it was even bigger, more overwhelming than ever. Most of the studies he’d done turned out to be useless for the actual poster, but he’d been wrapped up in the precise lines of the buildings and the fluid shapes of shadow and light cast by the lit windows and streetlights, by the movement of car headlamps and trolley lights. That hadn’t changed, really—the movement of people, the bustle of light, warm and organic, across the harsh shapes of the built world. Somehow, the silkscreened colors of the poster and the distant past it depicted made the city of the present more bearable, lent it some of the beauty of the city he remembered.

He wondered how Tony had found it, though. The posters were never signed; they weren’t the works of an individual artist. How had he even known that Steve had worked on this one? Or had he just known that Steve had done art for the WPA posters and made a lucky guess?

Steve wasn’t sure how long he stared at it before he was interrupted from his thoughts by the sound of a single clap of hands. “Shall we?” Stark said. “Lots more drinks outside for your fireworks viewing pleasure.”

As everyone made their way upstairs toward the landing pad, Steve stayed behind. He caught Tony’s arm as he began to follow the rest of the team.

“Thank you,” Steve said. He realized he still had his hand on Tony’s arm and dropped it. “I didn’t say before. It’s wonderful to see this again. Thank you,” he repeated.

Stark’s eyes flickered over Steve’s face. Finally, he slapped Steve on the shoulder. “No problem, Cap,” he said, turning toward the stairs.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Fury asked me to come to DC for a few days. He has some work he wants me and Romanoff and Barton to pick up here and there. Nothing that needs all of the Avengers. Might be worth a try. Got nothing better to do.

Maybe it’ll be like having a partner again. I know I have a team at my back. Or I’m supposed to. It doesn’t usually feel like it.

That’s probably my fault, since I’m supposed to be the one leading them.

There’s an exhibit about us, all the Howlies, at the Smithsonian. It seems like something you would have thought was hilarious, once, but I can’t quite figure out what’s funny about it.

 

Thinking about you all the time,

Steve

 

_________

 

Three weeks after his birthday, Steve hadn’t put anything in the frame Clint had given him. He hadn’t hung the WPA poster, either. He’d managed to put that in a frame, at least. When he’d come back to his room after excusing himself early from the fireworks display, there’d been a simple wooden frame leaning against his door, fitted with a mat cut in crisp, beveled edges to fit the poster. The next morning he’d slipped the paper behind the mat, replaced the glass, and then leaned the whole thing against a wall, thinking he’d pick where to hang it later on.

Natasha had just come by to discuss the mission they’d returned from a day previous, and while she hadn’t said anything, her eyes had flickered to where the pair of frames were tucked into one corner.

So now he was staring at the empty photo frame, trying to think of something to put in it. It would be easy, he knew, to get prints made of photos of Peggy, of his parents, of the Commandos. But he didn’t want to go through and pick one. If there was going to be a photo of one of them, there should be photos of all of them, and he only had the one frame. It would be easy to get more frames too, of course. But he’d have to look at frames and decide which ones he liked, which ones would go together, where they would hang, and how they’d be arranged, and there was still the matter of selecting photos. The pictures would be different sizes. Maybe the sizes weren’t standard any more, and he’d have to get custom frames. Or he’d have to crop the photos down. That meant more decisions, more looking at the pictures, deciding which moments were worth seeing again and again on the walls of the rooms where he lived. Making a judgment on the matter seemed at once too unimportant to spend any time on, and too weighty to fail at.

Steve sighed and rubbed his eyes. He could pick where to hang the poster, at least. It didn’t even matter, he could always change his mind and hang it somewhere else. It was just a poster. There were already some reproductions in his rooms, ones that had been hanging when he’d started living in the tower, and he’d never bothered moving them. The poster shouldn’t be any different, except that he had a particular interest in it. Shouldn’t that make it easier? Shouldn’t he have some opinion or intuition about where to hang it?

He wasn’t sure how his suite had ended up decorated the way it had, if some team of designers had been tasked with picking the furniture and the window treatments, if Ms. Potts had had a hand in it, or if it had been based on the apartment SHIELD had gotten for him in Park Slope. He would’ve suspected Coulson’s influence, if Coulson were alive. It was all warm browns and creams, like an Andrew Wyeth painting. It still felt empty and foreign, sometimes, but he was getting used to it, and he liked the way it filled with sunshine in the mornings. His favorite part was the huge panorama of the Brooklyn Bridge that covered nearly an entire wall of his bedroom. But that didn’t give him very much direction in terms of a design scheme to emulate. He thought, briefly, of printing out Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to go in his frame to complement the photo, but it was too long to fit in the photo frame. _Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, / Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd…_

Steve had been working on that poster just when Bucky had ended things with Helen, the latest girl he’d been seeing. Steve could picture Helen, tilting her head to laugh at something Bucky had said. He could hear the sound of an approaching subway, remembered how they’d crowded together to keep warm on the cold platform on an icy day, remembered how she’d taken off her wool mittens to have a smoke. She’d smoked constantly, more than anyone else he’d known even back then, and as a result never had spending money for much else. Bucky’s clothes had smelled like tobacco even when he couldn’t afford cigarettes himself, and everywhere he went he picked up extra matchbooks so he’d always have a light for her. Steve could remember all of that, but he couldn’t remember why they’d broken up. Had it been Bucky’s idea, or Helen’s? What good was it to remember a woman he’d barely known, who was probably dead now? It sure wasn’t helping him decide where to hang the poster, either.

No one even came to his rooms, anyway. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Maybe it had been, at first, but not any more. Stark had come by that morning to give him an upgraded tablet and a special digital stylus shaped like a paintbrush he’d asked Steve to test for him. Natasha had just been over to talk about the work with Fury, and she’d spent some time there before the mission, too, teasing him about his fashion choices while he packed. Before that, Bruce and Stark had stopped by to share some doughnuts they’d picked up. A few days before, Clint had barged in and insisted they were going to play video games together—which they had, after an hour of Clint cursing and grumbling while he tried to hook up the gaming system to the flatscreen in Steve’s living room. And a week ago Stark had come in with a question about the training schedule that somehow turned into a debate about whether reading a book digitally was as authentic an experience as reading a hard copy and from there into a discussion of Jules Verne.

It didn’t escape his notice that his team was doing their best to keep him from isolating himself, however much he wished they wouldn’t bother, however much it should have been his responsibility and none of theirs.

So. Stark had given it to him, and he was the one who kept barging in the most. Steve might as well hang the poster somewhere Stark would see, he figured.

There was a little picture hanging kit taped to the back of the frame, and he had a canvas bag of basic tools in a closet somewhere. He dug out the hammer and banged the hanging nail into place with a feeling of finality.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

People love buying things in the future. It’s an end to itself. There are magazines and websites and articles where people just talk about the things they want to buy or have bought or would buy if they had the money—not catalogs, where they’re trying to sell the things to you, just people who want to talk about buying things. Like it’s a hobby.

Even poor people do it. There was another stock market crash a few years ago, but everyone keeps buying things because it’s supposed to help. Help the economy, help them feel better, I don’t know. Money is so different now, and buying things is what you’re supposed to do, and most people would still be poor whether they bought the things or not, and these days if you don’t have one of the things that you’re _supposed_ to have—a computer, a car with a computer in it, a phone that’s a computer—you can’t talk to people so you can’t get a job and you can’t get anywhere so you couldn’t get to a job if you had one and then you’re even poorer than if you hadn’t bought half-a-dozen different shapes of computer in the first place.

Anyway. I thought I’d try it. Embrace the zeitgeist and so on. It’s pretty much my first time not being poor myself, after all. I bought some paper and nice pens. This sketchbook with a leather cover. It’s supposed to look old-fashioned, but of course it’s all mass-produced. The shop had a whole aisle just of different kinds of pens with black ink—there were other aisles for ones in other colors, and more just for markers, all crammed together in this shop between a bodega and a fried chicken restaurant. I tell ya, it’s worse than trying to pick a type of peanut butter. I ended up getting a set of fountain pens, some felt-tip ones, these ones with brushes at the tips, and a few of the thin markers.

My rooms face south and I know there’s a time I would have done just about anything to get to paint somewhere with light like that, up above all of Manhattan, all that space to myself.

But I brought them back to the tower and they’re just sitting there. The brush pens are still in their little plastic and cardboard boxes.

I think I’ll try books, next. All the empty shelves in my apartment make me feel guilty, like I could be doing something more productive. I’ve been trying to catch up on everything I missed, but I get tired of screens. It’s worth a shot.

 

Thinking of you,

Steve

 

_________

 

Steve opened his door to find Clint grinning at him, a 6-pack hooked in one hand. “Ready to drink?” he asked, pushing his way past Steve into the room.

“Did we have plans?” Steve asked. JARVIS usually reminded him.

“We do now,” Clint replied, settling onto Steve’s cushy leather couch and snapping open a beer. “Nat and Bruce should be here in a minute. Stark’s finishing some work thing, he’ll be a little later.”

“I didn’t really—” Steve started to say, but then Natasha let herself in without knocking, looking unrepentant and trailed by a more sheepish Bruce.

“We’re finally going to watch ‘The Artist,’” Natasha explained, setting a bottle of sake on a wooden side table by the couch.

“Which one is that?” Steve asked, sinking down beside Clint. Apparently this was going to happen whether he was on board or not. Natasha was already heading into his kitchen to get glasses.

Clint made a face and tossed back a beer. “It came out like a year ago. It’s French, it’s a silent film, and it’s in black white. AKA, _boring_.”

Steve frowned. “Hey, I watch movies in color, I’m not—”

“It’s supposed to be really good,” Bruce interrupted. “It got the academy award and everything.”

“Score,” Clint crowed. “If Cap hates it too, does that mean we get to see my pick?”

Steve wasn’t sure he’d hate it, exactly. He just didn’t like being pandered to. He’d been 9 when “The Jazz Singer” had come out, it wasn’t as if he needed silent movies to feel at home. If he wanted to watch a silent film, there were plenty he’d never had a chance to see at the cinema when they were new. Hell, he hadn’t even invited anyone to his rooms, hadn’t wanted to watch a movie at all.

Natasha returned with a tray of ceramic sake cups he hadn’t known he owned. “We are _not_ watching ‘Toy Story 3.’”

“Maybe Steve should choose,” Bruce suggested. “Since we invaded his suite.”

“What do you wanna watch, then?” Clint asked.

“Well. I like adventure stories. I used to read a lot of science fiction.”

“‘Attack the Block!’” Clint yelled.

The door opened again and in sauntered Stark, wearing what looked to Steve like dress pants and shoes paired with a beat-up band logo t-shirt. “What are we attacking?”

“Just arguing over what movie to watch,” Bruce said.

“‘Magic Mike,’” Stark said immediately, making a beeline toward the sake.

“I’ll second that,” Natasha said, raising a cup of sake in salute.

“Let’s watch a preview first,” Bruce suggested, his eyes flicking to Steve with something like concern. “And then pick.”

“We’re watching a trailer for ‘Toy Story 3,’ then, too,” Clint insisted.

In the end, they saw “Magic Mike.” It was stupid and silly in a way Steve had been wholly unprepared for, yet still somehow had something to say about socioeconomic inequality and the American dream, and he suspected Stark had only suggested it to try to scandalize him with all the nudity and exotic dancing. Altogether, it left him with a favorable impression. He’d even laughed out loud at a couple of parts. And it didn’t hurt that it was about so many beautiful people, either.

A week later, everyone came into his suite again to watch “The Artist,” which turned out to be pretty funny as well. The week after that Steve and Nat were on a mission with the STRIKE team, but two days after they got back, the whole team was in Steve’s suite to watch “RED” while Clint talked over the dialogue about every gun that appeared onscreen. Stark made Steve promise to read _The Hobbit_ before they watched the movie, which prompted Bruce to ask him to read the _Harry Potter_ books before they watched _those,_ and the following week when they gave into Clint’s demands and started the first “Toy Story,” Clint managed to extract a promise from Steve that he’d read _The Hunger Games_ as well.

Somehow he’d ended up hosting team movie nights and a book club, too.

He remembered when he and Bucky would spend evenings sitting around the wood-paneled Zenith radio in Arnie’s living room, listening to radio serials: Dick Tracy, Buck Rogers, or the Lone Ranger. If they were lucky, Arnie’s mom would make them sufganiyot. Steve would carefully unfold and flatten out the thin cardboard of the packaged food the Roth’s bought and use it to sketch out scenes from the serials, most often Silver, Dusty, Scout, and the other horses from the Lone Ranger. Occasionally he’d try to draw the Ranger’s face, carefully filling in the lines of the black domino mask, and he and Arnie would argue over whether he should look more like Gary Cooper or Errol Flynn until Bucky told them both to shut up so he could listen to the program, even if it was just an advertising spot.

He was lucky, he thought, that his team was so determined come together as a team whether he led them there or not.

 

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

I wish it weren’t so hard to see you in person. I wish I could take care of you the way I was supposed to. (I know you don’t need taking care of—you can take care of yourself and you always have. But I want to anyway.)

Instead I’m writing letters to you that I’m never going to send, as if you were already dead. Or maybe as if you’re still the same age as I am.

Would you hate that I’m writing this instead of talking to you? I could pick up a phone and call you right now. I could borrow a jet and be in DC in an hour. I could hop on my bike and be there first thing in the morning. Maybe you’d think it’s funny. Or maybe you’d have something clever to say about it.

Maybe it would be like the last time I saw you, and you wouldn’t remember any of the times I’d visited or that I was still alive, and you’d look at me like you thought you were hallucinating. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known, you shouldn’t be crying over me, nothing should do that to you, least of all me.

Or maybe it would be one of your good days, and we’d spend the whole day talking about Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen or arguing about the American way of spelling things or looking at photos of your grandkids.

Writing doesn’t really feel like it’s helping, but it’s all I can do.

I miss you so much, and I shouldn’t, because you’re alive, and shouldn’t I be happy that you’re alive? It’s just hard. To muster up excitement just to say goodbye.

It doesn’t feel like you’re really alive, is the thing. It feel like you’re two people and one of them is dead and I’ll never see her again and the other is sick in bed and she should remember the same things I do, but she doesn’t, some days she doesn’t remember anything at all.

 

Love,

Steve

 

_________

 

Steve was trying to make sense of the coffeemaker in the shared kitchen when Tony sauntered in, wearing baggy velour pants and a t-shirt with a garish red flower printed on it, his hair a spiky mess. “Hey, have you seen that print exhibit at MoMa yet?” he asked by way of greeting.

“Uh, not yet,” Steve replied, frowning. He didn’t remember talking about a print exhibit, with Tony or anyone else. He wasn’t even really sure what exhibit Tony meant.

“Wanna go tonight?” Tony asked from inside the refrigerator.

“Sure,” Steve said. He didn’t want to go, really. But he knew he should be spending more time with the team, and he still hadn’t quite worked out how to talk to Stark.

“Sweet.” Tony shut the fridge, opened the bag of mozzarella he’d taken out, and tossed a handful of shreds into his mouth. “Dinner first?”

“Sure,” Steve said again. “Are you eating cheese for breakfast?”

Tony shrugged. “It’s like string cheese but for adults,” he said, as if that explained anything.

“Right. Coffee?” Steve nodded toward the machine. Steve must have done something right, because the pot was now full and steaming.

“Intravenously, please,” Tony said, licking another clump of cheese out of his palm as he turned to the cabinet with the mugs. “Meet you in the garage at eight?”

“Sounds good.” Steve watched as Tony took five huge mugs down from the shelf and filled each one with coffee. “You and Bruce have guests in the lab?” he guessed.

“What? Oh.” He chuckled, bending over the counter to grasp all five mugs, and his bag of cheese, in his arms at once, a proposition that seemed to involve a lot more of his elbows than necessary. “All mine. Coffeemaker in the workshop is busted, gonna survive on the microwaved stuff until I can get it going again.” He successfully lifted the mugs in his arms and headed back toward the elevator. “See you tonight!” he called.

“Right,” Steve said slowly, watching as the elevator doors closed.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

The last mission with Nat went alright. As far as those things go, I guess.

When I got back to the tower, there was a box outside my door, wrapped in brown paper and twine. Like when we were kids. It was that old tin cigar box with the eagle on the front. Everything was still inside it, even the pressed leaf from the Camperdown Elm. I’d’ve thought it would’ve all ended up in a trash heap, but here it is.

I don’t even remember mentioning it to anyone. I couldn’t have listed all of the things in here if I’d tried. That was the point of keeping them, I guess, so I’d have something to remember it all by.

So now I have the newspaper clipping with the list of everyone in the neighborhood who was shipping out when you did, with your name right there in black and white.

If you hadn’t gone, you probably would’ve died by now, anyway—I checked on Arnie, you know, and he died just a few months before I came out of the ice—but it would’ve been a lot later. And it wouldn’t have been my fault. There was no stopping you, I know that, no more than anyone could’ve stopped me. It’s no good to imagine it, I suppose, but I keep doing it anyway.

 

Thinking of you,

Steve

 

_________

 

Bruce was curled up on the floor, leaning against a bulkhead, as he dozed off his transformation. Natasha and Clint bickered in the cockpit. Farmland whizzed by outside the front windows of the quinjet, clouds and cerulean blue skies outside the skylights. The mission had gone well, all things considered. No casualties, no major property damage, and they’d recovered the files Fury had sent them after. There’d been a couple of moments where they could’ve used another flier, though. It had worked out this time, but if Thor wasn’t going to be a regular part of the team, maybe Steve could see about getting Colonel Rhodes reassigned. If he wanted to be on the team, of course—Steve had only met him a handful of times and didn’t have a good read on him, but knew he was a good fighter and a good friend.

Steve was jolted from his rumination by Tony taking the seat beside him. “So, Winghead. You got any plans for the big day?”

“What?”

“Tomorrow,” Tony said, rearranging his legs into a tangled lotus position.

Steve frowned. There wasn’t anything on his calendar. Not for him, anyway—he’d asked JARVIS to keep him updated on when major holidays were, since there were so many new ones and even the old ones were hard to keep track of, so he knew the next day was Shemini Atzeret, the holiday at the end of Sukkot. Over the last week, he’d often caught himself remembering a Sukkot shabbat he’d spent with Arnie and his parents.

The Roths had a nicer apartment than Steve’s ma did, but it was still an apartment, so there hadn’t been a yard to build a sukkah in. They hadn’t been able to get their hands on any palm leaves, either. Instead, on a Sunday right before the holiday began, Arnie and Steve had spent the afternoon collecting branches from the pines, oaks, and maples in Owl’s Head Park, carrying them back to Arnie’s place, and talking about the World Series—to their dismay, the Yankees had just swept the the last four games against the Pirates. The roof of the sukkah ended up being built mostly from the tender, leafy boughs they’d cut after climbing as high as they could in a thick beech tree with low, heavy branches. Well, Arnie had done most of the climbing, in the end, but Steve had made it higher up the tree that day than he usually managed before his wheezing got the better of him.

The night of the dinner, Arnie’s mother had hung apples from the kitchen ceiling with twine and served a squash soup. They ate out of thick ceramic bowls while they huddled under the haphazard sukkah that leaned against one wall of the living room, and Arnie’s father retold the story of Exodus. Steve couldn’t think of the holiday now without remembering that feeling of being at home with a family he’d chosen for himself, the comfort of knowing his own ma would be at home when he came back later that night, sleeping off a long shift at the hospital. Steve must have been 10 years old, 11 at the oldest. Arnie was a couple years older, and later that night, after the dishes were done, when they were alone in Arnie’s room eating apples, Arnie had told him how he was pretty sure he liked other boys instead of girls. Not, he was quick to add, Steve himself—but boys generally. The way Walt Whitman did, he’d said.

“Earth to Cap.” Tony poked him in the shoulder.

“Tomorrow’s Monday,” Steve said at last.

“It’s been a year since you woke up,” Tony said, his voice gentle, the laughter gone from his eyes. “Thought you might want company. To celebrate making it a year, or maybe mourn the dead, reminisce, that kind of thing. But”—he pursed his lips—“it sounds like you didn’t remember and I just reminded you, so I’ll just—”

Steve cut him off. “Company would be nice.” He didn’t have Arnie to celebrate Sukkot with any more, but he had people here, now, who wanted to be his friends, to find other rituals to observe.

Tony’s shoulders relaxed. “Right on. Got anything in mind?”

“Can’t say I do. Did you have a plan?”

“Several,” Tony admitted, half of his mouth quirked up. “Wanna give me a clue, or just let me guess?”

“Let’s celebrate,” Steve said. He didn’t feel like celebrating, exactly, and he wasn’t proud of how he’d handled—was still handling—being in the 21st century. But it didn’t seem quite right to spend the day grieving, either. He spent enough time doing that as it was, and it didn’t do the dead any good. Grief wasn’t right for Arnie and Peggy and all of the Commandos who’d gone on to live long full lives while Steve was gone, anyway. Bucky’s absence went beyond grief, to a place that was mostly guilt and exhaustion, a place that was entirely Steve’s own.

The slow grin that filled Tony’s face was so wide and delighted it sent a tingle up Steve’s neck. “Perfect. I’ll come get you at your suite at noon tomorrow.”

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Okay, here’s something for you to laugh at me about. I’m not laughing—not yet, anyway—but I can just picture your face if you heard, and that’s just as good. Maybe better.

How do you tell if you’re out on a date or just spending time together as friends?

Yeah yeah, laugh it up.

A few weeks ago Tony took me out for dinner and then to a museum. We had some fun together, I think. It wasn’t as bad as that time you and Evie dragged me out with that girl Lorraine, anyway. A few days later we went to the movies and fought over a bucket of popcorn that should’ve been enough for a whole baseball team, and I think I even had a good time. Last week was the anniversary of me being alive again, and we spent the whole afternoon and all the evening together. We ended up in Queens and he showed me where the 1964 World’s Fair had been, or what’s left of it, at least. Tony’s a bit like a World’s Fair himself—not that I ever made it to the ’39 one, but I saw the postcards and of course there was the Stark Expo the night before you shipped out—bustling and shining and fit to burst at the seams with excitement, like he’s made up of spotlights and stardust and he might just blast off into the air on his own steam. He took me to a science museum, which he kept apologizing for, saying it was only to indulge himself, but it turns out I just like listening to him talk, even when it’s about an exhibit on microbes that’s designed for grade schoolers. After that we went ice skating and then to the zoo and then to Chinatown where we ate the thickest, spiciest noodles I’ve ever had, and I don’t know how exactly all of this was supposed to celebrate a year of being in the 21st century but it sure did a good job of getting me to enjoy myself.

When we headed back to the tower I was saying something about how sometimes at night, from up in my rooms in the tower, the city looked the same, or not as upsettingly different, and somehow we ended up going flying. We didn’t even make it inside the door, he had his Iron Man suit zip down to get him and then he grabbed me like he does in battle and next thing I knew we were seeing the lights of Manhattan from a hundred feet above the tallest skyscraper and I was laughing and he was calling me an adrenaline junkie.

Then a couple days after that we went to a show and then got falafel and walked around the park and I dunno Buck, it seemed like the sort of thing people do on dates. But then we got back to the tower and he just popped off back to his workshop. Was I supposed to ask him upstairs or something?

Go ahead and laugh, I’ll wait.

Everyone says he’s this suave tomcat, is the thing. Probably I’d be able to tell if he was really trying to pick me up.

Men never touch each other any more, you know? Tony does but I think that’s just how he is with everyone. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t have this problem with any of the others, is the thing. Clint and I have been to a couple baseball games and Bruce and Nat and I went to this book reading together and sometimes Clint takes me shopping or Nat goes out on her Harley with me, and I never wonder if I’m supposed to be kissing any of _them_.

I don’t even know if I wanted him to come inside. I’m sure he’d show me a good time, that’s not really in question. What would I even do with Tony Stark in my bedroom, anyway?

I think maybe having a good time for once is messing with my head.

Yeah, my misery is hilarious, I know.

 

I hope I really could make you smile if you were here.

Steve

 

_________

 

“What the fuck are you doing with all those prunes?”

Steve looked up from his saucepan to see Clint staring at him over the rims of a set of rectangular, purple-tinted glasses. “I’m making pudding.”

“With prunes?” Clint wrinkled his nose and hoisted himself up to sit on a barstool next to the stove.

“Why not?”

“Um, because they’re gross?”

“Clint, you put canned pineapple and tuna fish on room-temperature pizza and eat it for breakfast,” Natasha pointed out, not looking up from the tablet she was reading. She leaned over the kitchen island on her elbows, the baggy fabric of her hoodie—a gray one that Steve was sure had originally belonged to Clint—pooling around her arms. “And I think it’s a Depression-era thing. Like those cheese and horseradish sandwiches he eats all the time.”

“But,” Clint frowned at Steve. “You live with a billionaire now. You can eat anything you want. And you don’t have to cook for yourself.”

“I just found this old recipe and thought I’d try it.” Steve shrugged and turned back to his pan.

“Well, at least Thor will eat it,” Clint said thoughtfully. “That guy eats anything.”

“Thor’s coming?” Steve asked. He’d checked his SHIELD email earlier that morning and hadn’t seen anything about that.

“We just found out. Darcy texted me,” Natasha explained. “He’s in Quebec with Dr. Foster for now, but they’re coming to the tower in a few days.”

Steve carefully ladled his prune mixture into a porcelain ramekin. “Is he planning on staying?”

“We’ll see,” Natasha said.

“He’d better,” Clint put in.

“Isn’t he—you know—a prince? Of an entire planet?” Steve nudged Clint’s legs out of the way as he carried the ramekin over to the fridge.

Clint shook his head. “His dad can handle it. We’re much more important than those Asgardian assholes, anyway.”

“Thor’s an Asgardian too,” Natasha reminded him, a small smile playing on her lips as she took a sip of her tea.

“Yeah, but.” Clint waved a hand in dismissal. “He’s a cool one.”

“He’s the only one you’ve met, Clint,” Steve said, leaning against the fridge and crossing his arms. He figured it went without saying that Loki—who Thor had explained was technically a Frost Giant anyway—didn’t count.

“I don’t need to meet any more to know that Thor’s the best one,” Clint insisted. “Hey, are you on a cooking thing now? Do you have any Depression recipes that aren’t, y’know, depressing as fuck?”

Steve thought for a moment. “There’s an apple cake you’d probably like. If I added more sugar,” he added. “But I didn’t see a pan for it.”

“Sounds better than prune pudding,” Clint agreed.

“We cooked with hot dogs a lot,” Steve said thoughtfully. “I’d kind of forgotten.”

“Do you actually miss eating that stuff?” Clint asked.

The question caught Steve off-guard. He turned it around in his mind. When he looked up, it was to Natasha’s assessing gaze. Clint, bored, had his phone out and was typing something on it. “Some of it,” Steve said finally.

Two days later, when Steve came into the shared kitchen after his morning run and shower, there was a brand new bundt cake pan on the counter, still in its cardboard box.

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

You probably knew at the time and just didn’t say anything, but it was Howard who paid for those nylons I bought you.

I kept part of the packaging. It has a flying dove on it. A symbol of peace. Like by buying these expensive stockings we were getting closer to the end of the war.

I still remember your lipstick. Cyclax, Auxiliary Red. Victory Red for special occasions.

I can’t remember your voice, any more. The voice you had when we were young, I mean. Well. When you were young. I can just hear how you sound now—so, so tired. I guess that’s what happens after you’ve lived an entire life.

It was just Armistice Day. Veterans Day, they call it these days.

I have a PR manager now. Her name is Sheila and she seems like a lovely person. Tony hired one for each of us on the team, for our appearance in the media as ourselves instead of Avengers, he said. Fury has a PR department just for the team and everything we do with SHIELD. They wanted us to do something for the parade but Natasha talked him out of it, thank god—we aren’t that kind of soldier, after all. I had about a hundred requests to give speeches without the rest of the team, to go on TV shows and radio shows and talk about bravery and sacrifice. And those were just the ones Sheila thought were worth showing me. At least it’s her job to say no to all of them so I don’t have to do it myself.

Nat and Clint and Tony ended up going to the 9/11 Memorial. Bruce and Thor went to the parade just to be in the audience.

There’s a statue of me in Bay Ridge now, can you believe it? In McKinley Park, near the library. They put it there in the 1970’s. It’s not completely terrible, as a statue, I guess. Bruce says it was supposed to stir up support for the war in Vietnam, which is pretty horrible. I should ask Sheila if there’s a way I can get it taken down. I would rather have a tree in Central Park dedicated to me or something, if they’re going to do anything. I saw some pictures online of people using it in anti-war protests, though. I wish they could’ve asked me what I thought about all of it, because I would’ve been on their side. These days it’s always covered in flowers and photos of people who died in the Chitauri invasion.

Anyway. I didn’t see my statue on Veterans Day, that’s for sure. And I couldn’t stand to be anywhere near the parade, which goes by just a couple blocks from the tower. Instead I did what I used to do and visited my favorite statues of the doughboys in Manhattan. Remembering the first world war seems more important than ever now. Most people now barely know what it was about, let alone that it was supposed to be the last war anyone ever fought. Armistice Day was meant to be about world peace. I wonder if that’s what my da thought he was fighting for. If he thought he was fighting for anything at all.

I saw you two days ago. The real you, the one in a hospital bed. No, not a hospital. Assisted living, that’s what it’s called. We didn’t talk about wars or world peace or Veterans Day. That’s something I can only talk to you about—the dead Peggy, the young one with victory rolls, that fire-engine-red hat, and the suit with the bright white lapels. I see her sometimes, even if I can’t hear her voice. She’s superimposed over you, like two exposures on a single negative.

Instead I told you about spending time with my team, about taking Thor to the Strand (he had some pretty funny expectations about what “18 miles of books” meant), getting milkshakes with Clint and Nat, volunteering at the children’s hospital with Tony, the galleries in Chelsea I went to with Pepper, my latest mission with Natasha, visiting the planetarium with Tony and Bruce. You asked me if I had my eye on anyone and I said something about still not knowing how to talk to women and you just _looked_ at me and asked if I knew how to talk to men, either.

How do you know everything, huh? Or is it just me you know everything about?

 

Missing you,

Steve

 

_________

 

“You know,” Steve said when they reached the bottom of the ice-slick steps of the Federal-style mansion. “I _am_ interested in things that don’t have to do with American history.”

“Of course you are,” Tony said smoothly. “But Alexander Hamilton is your favorite president, right?”

“I know you know he was never president,” Steve insisted. “And he’s only my favorite founding father because people keep asking me, and I have to say _something_.”

“Where to now?”

“There’s an exhibit about George Washington’s wooden teeth at the other end of the park,” Steve said evenly.

Tony stared at him. Then he laughed. “Oh fuck you Captain Pokerface, I totally believed you for a second. Seriously, anything in mind?”

“Why don’t you pick somewhere you won’t be bored out of your mind,” Steve teased.

Tony pouted. “I was not bored out of my mind!” Steve watched the warm puff of his breath dissipate in front of his mouth and wondered idly if ice ever formed on the tips of his beard.

“Yeah, I could tell you were just enraptured by the historical accuracy of the interior rooms.” Steve, on the other hand, had actually been interested. He’d visited St. Nicholas Park and the rest of the neighborhood regularly as a college student but had never been inside the Hamilton Grange before. It was fascinating how the house had been restored to how it could have looked over 200 years earlier.

“I’m fine,” Tony insisted.  

“If you say so,” Steve said. He knew Tony was just trying to get him to do something he’d like. It was sweet, but he wouldn’t mind seeing Tony have a good time, too. “Why don’t you pick where we go next anyway.” He wondered sometimes why Tony put up with him at all, with all of the old-fashioned things he liked, when Tony was always moving, always changing, both himself and the whole world around him.

Tony pursed his lips and burrowed his face for a moment into the silky red scarf draped around his neck and shoulders. “Well. There’s this restaurant on a 135th Street—”

Steve smiled. “There you go. Mind if we take this way?” He indicated the terrace along the edge of the park. It was well-traversed and clear of snow and ice, as far as he could tell. “It’d be nice to see what City College looks like now.”

Tony nodded, already walking in that direction. “Oh yeah, that’s where you went to school, huh?”

Steve took a moment to take in the soft evening light playing across the damp pavement, breathe the cold winter air, and enjoy the view of Tony’s golden skin. “For a couple years,” he agreed. “Had to get work,” he explained at Tony’s questioning expression.

“Fine art, right?” Tony walked with his hands in the pockets of his dark coat, one elbow swinging into Steve with each step. Their shadows mingled with those of the bare trees and the wrought iron fence, a tapestry of light and dark on the gray pavement.

“Yep. Though mostly I remember talking politics with the other students.”

“You? Caring about politics?” Tony made an exaggerated look of surprise. “Hmm, can’t picture it.”

Steve just scoffed and ducked his head.

“What kind of politics were there to talk about, back in the day, then?”

“Trotskyism versus Stalinism versus the New Deal, that kind of thing—we used to say that the basement cafeteria in Shepard Hall was the only place in the world where a fair debate between Trotskyists and Stalinists could happen. I went to a couple anti-fascist rallies.”

“Of course you did.”

“Isn’t that the kind of thing most people get up to in college?” Once he said it, Steve remembered that Howard Stark probably looked down on that kind of thing, and that Howard Stark was one of Tony’s least favorite topics of conversation. So much for seeing Tony have a good time.

But Tony just shook his head. Steve watched, waiting for his posture to tense as it always did when the subject of Howard came up, but Tony remained as fluid and relaxed as ever. “Not me, I was too busy building, drinking, coding, and partying, in approximately that order.”

“Do I want to know how drinking and partying are two different spots on the list?”

Tony grinned, a wide, mischievous thing that filled his face and made something in Steve’s chest churn in delight. “Probably not. And c’mon, are you telling me you didn’t get up to any kind of parties during your college years?”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t have any wild years at all? Radical politics, but otherwise totally straitlaced?”

“I dated a little, if that’s what you mean.” Steve thought of Saul, a sweet business major with bright hazel eyes and curly brown hair, who he’d been with for six months. Then Saul had volunteered to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and been killed in the action.

“Not really the reckless debauchery I’d hoped for, but it’ll do. What did you do for fun, then?”

“Whatever was cheap, really. I mostly dated other students, so we went to each other’s department art shows and theater productions and that sort of thing. When I had some money to spare, we’d take the ferry to Staten Island or get dinner and a movie.” Another memory of Saul struck him then, one of sharing a slice of strawberry shortcake after seeing a film in Times Square. “Coney Island sometimes, I always loved the Wonder Wheel. But the best one was when we went to see Caesar. Orson Welles, you know? At the Mercury Theater. I still have the playbill for that.”

“So that’s the kind of thing you kept,” Tony said thoughtfully.

Steve found himself grinning. He stopped walking to turn and look at Tony. “I should’ve known it was you who got me my memento box back. How’d you find that thing, anyway?”

Tony stopped too, a luminous smile on his lips, his eyes crinkling. “Not telling,” he insisted, and Steve found himself staring at Tony’s mouth. He snapped his gaze back up to Tony’s eyes, glittering and warm. _Beautiful_ , Steve found himself thinking.

“Well,” he said after what was probably far too long a pause. “Thank you. It means a lot.”

Tony looked away then and started walking again, shutting down the way he often did when any of the hard work he did was acknowledged. “Sure thing, Capuchin,” he said. “Hmm, that one didn’t really work, yeah, now that I’ve said it out loud, it doesn’t work at all. Capybara, how’s that? Okay, Capybara, let’s go, I’m starving.”

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Ready for another laugh at my expense?

Last night Tony took me to this restaurant in the Village, insisting I try this one special Japanese rice bowl with a deep-fried pork cutlet. Then we went to a comedy club. Afterward we were walking down 7th Avenue, and we passed right by where Life Cafeteria used to be. It’s a bank now, but it still has the Art Deco tiles on the facade. I was telling Tony about going there with Saul, Arnie, and Ernst. I saved a matchbook from one of those nights, so I was looking at it the other day when I was going through all my mementos, and I guess it was on my mind.

A lot of people now think they invented being gay, like we didn’t have it when we were young, or something, so I was telling him about the scene there, and then he stopped and asked me if he misunderstood and whether I was saying I dated men as well as women. I reminded him that City College only let in men at the time I went there and that I’d told him I mostly dated my classmates, and he had this look on his face like—I don’t know, like he’d never really seen me before and maybe had never encountered a human being at all in his life.

So that answers my question, doesn’t it. He couldn’t exactly have been taking me out on dates if he didn’t even know I date men, could he?

I was just starting to hope he’d kiss me, too.

I guess it isn’t really that funny, huh.

 

Missing you,

Steve

 

_________

 

"I’m afraid it’s not very authentic,” Thor said apologetically, a mournful look in his eyes as he surveyed the food spread across the dining table. “Chicken eggs don’t compare to the real thing. The closest equivalent I could find to the bird I needed is the auk, which is extinct.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great,” Jane said, patting him on the arm with one hand while she ladled stew onto her plate with the other. A silky dark green leaf snaked across her portion. Steve thought it might be seaweed. He hadn’t seen everything that had gone into the stew; when he’d come onto the deck to join the others, it had already been mixed together in the cast-iron cauldron Thor had dangled over a fire pit with a chain.

“The lamb though, that’s much closer to how it should be,” Thor added, brightening.

“It better be, you were smoking that thing for a week,” Clint complained.

“Sorry I’m late,” Tony said as he bustled in, not sounding sorry at all. “How was sightseeing?” He moved around the table, reaching around people’s shoulders and piling his plate with food from every end before taking the seat between Steve and Bruce.

Jane had been complaining lately that Thor was distracting her in the lab, so Thor was on the lookout for ways to occupy his days outside of battle. That morning Bruce had suggested a Walt Whitman in New York walking tour and invited Steve along as well.

“So cool,” Thor said. “I didn’t know Bruce was so knowledgeable about Midgardian poets.”

“I dated a lit major for a while,” Bruce said with a small shrug. “Had to keep up somehow.”

“It’s very different from the poetry I grew up with,” Thor continued. “Much shorter.”

“Our lives are much shorter,” Natasha replied with a small smirk.

“Still,” Thor went on. “The themes of friendship, camaraderie, love, individualism, sexual congress—worthy topics for a poet of any world.”

Jane turned to Thor, her face halfway between a frown and a laugh. “There’s Asgardian poetry about sex?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“It—I don’t know,” she admitted. “I guess it seems, sort of, well, not grand and godly and epic enough for Asgard.”

Thor laughed—softly, by his standards, but still loud enough to rattle his wine glass against Jane’s. “I’ll have to take you to a poetry reading in my father’s hall someday.” He grinned at her until she flushed and laughed, too.

“You guys have public readings of sex poetry in your palace?” Bruce asked.  

Thor waved a hand. “We have public readings of poetry of all kinds.”

“Yeah, it’s not like Odin’s hosting orgies or something,” Clint said, his mouth still full of smoked lamb.

“I didn’t say that,” Thor replied.

Clint gaped. “You’re fucking with me!” Thor shook his head, his smile taking on a wolfish gleam. Clint turned to Natasha. “Nat, Thor is fucking with me,” he whined.

“We’re not as shy about sex as you on Earth are,” Thor said with a shrug. “It’s just one of many ways people have of celebrating and enjoying ourselves.”

“But—” Clint looked at each of them in turn, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. “But you go to orgies?”

Thor chuckled. “Not lately.” Jane smiled up at him and pinched his bicep.

Clint leaned forward in interest. “What other kinky shit do Asgardians get up to?”

“I’d like everyone to, just, note, please—Barton asked that, not me,” Tony said.

“It’s not a big deal,” Thor insisted. “Mortals are the ones with all the hangups and taboos.”

“Like what?” Clint asked. “What hangups and taboos do we have?”

“Not you personally,” Thor said. “None of you, I’m sure! I meant Midgardians generally.”

“Actually, I’ve been trying to set up a time for my colleague, Dr. Araujo, to interview Thor about Asgardian sexuality,” Jane said. “She’s an anthropologist, and I know she’d be thrilled to talk to you about it.”

“I’d love to,” Thor said, bending down to peck Jane on the forehead.

“Is Araujo the one who wrote that paper about the impact of technology on modern sexuality?” Tony said. Steve watched his throat move as he took a bite of stew. He turned away when Tony took a sip of wine, and Steve realized he’d been staring at his mouth.

“That’s the one,” Jane said.

“Isn’t her specialty gender fluidity?” Bruce asked.

“Yes!” Jane agreed. “That’s part of why I want her to talk to Thor. His brother is—” She cut herself off abruptly, her eyes darting to Clint with something like panic. “I mean. Asgardians understand gender very differently than we do.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Clint said, clearly trying to keep his tone light. “I can handle hearing about Loki’s gender journey. I know you miss him, big guy.”

“I do miss him,” Thor agreed. “But I don’t need to do so around people he’s hurt.”

“He’s still your brother,” Bruce said softly.

“Well, he’s often been my sister or sibling, as Jane was saying. And he’s not the person I thought he was. That’s who I miss,” Thor said. Jane took his hand and squeezed it over the table. “I miss the sibling I remember from when we were young. I visited him often, when I was in Asgard. Hogun said I seemed unhappier after each time I saw him than when I didn’t. When I don’t see him, it’s easier to remember Loki as my sibling and comrade. Seeing him reminded me that to him, I'm a rival and an antagonist, and that’s what he is to me now, as well.”

It took awhile for the conversation to begin again after that pronouncement. Finally Natasha started making suggestions for Thor’s next New York outing, while Clint, Tony, and Jane enthusiastically yelled out counter-proposals. Clint was gunning for the Houdini Museum, Natasha for a Berlin Wall fragment, Tony for a museum of math, and Jane was listing murals, street art, and public sculptures she’d heard about.

Steve kept thinking about what Thor had said, about missing someone when they were right in front of you, about reconciling the past and present versions of a person, and wondered if that feeling would ever go away.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Usually I miss people just for myself. But lately I’ve been wishing that Thor could’ve met Arnie’s old boyfriend Ernst. I wouldn’t have gone to City College if I hadn’t met Ernst, and he’s the one who took us to that art gallery where you met Patricia, so you could say we both owe him a lot.

I saved the label from the bottle of schnapps Dr. Erskine’ and I shared the night before Rebirth, and I was looking at it today. Usually it makes me remember Erskine, Peggy, and Phillips. But today I remembered Ernst and something Dr. Esrkine said to me that night, that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own.

I wish I could have seen the Berlin that Ernst knew before he got driven out. No one got hassled at the gay bars. They made movies about men who were with men and women who were with women, there was a whole institute just for researching sexuality, and all over there were cabarets and plays and people making art and studying the world and the people in it. Some of the things Ernst used to say about it sound now like tall tales he made up just to impress me, his younger boyfriend’s even younger friend, but I looked it up and it’s really more amazing than he said. Quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics and all of these other things Tony likes to tell me about were practically invented there. And the art and the architecture and the design—Bauhaus and New Objectivity and Dada, and that’s just what survived the war.

That’s what the Nazis wiped out when they took power. The place where Ernst was studying typography before the Gestapo closed the Berlin Bauhaus. The place where people were welcome to be who they were or use science and art to find out.

Thor and I went to the Whitney a few days ago, last week Tony took us both to try Japanese-Jewish fusion cuisine, and the week before that I showed Thor all my favorite spots in Central Park—he loved the zoo and the bird sanctuary and the Shakespeare Garden. And I guess it’s normal to want to introduce your friends to your other friends, but usually it’s you or Peggy I wish people could meet, and I’m more used to not being able to. Thinking about how Thor would never get to meet Ernst and hear him talk about Paul Klee or Der Ring—it hit me hard, and I can’t stop it from going around and around in my head.

I can’t remember Ernst’s last name, is the thing. He could even still be alive. I could probably find him if I really tried.  

Arnie’s husband, Michael, is still alive. Natasha says I should write to him. They got married just before Arnie died, right when it became legal in New York. There was even a photo of them in the paper, saying they’d been together for more than fifty years and then got to be one of the first gay couples in the state to marry. Arnie’s mom had so many ideas about who he would marry and Arnie would get all out of sorts about it, but I guess it worked out after all. He became a doctor like she wanted, too.

Would you have gotten married, too, if you’d lived? Your mother always told us to marry a woman who knew how to garden, because then we’d always have vegetables to eat. I imagine you with someone like Peggy, someone who could keep up with you—or, I should say, someone for you to keep up with. You’d be one of those couples that no one could keep their eyes off of when you danced together, like a pair of film stars.

It’s nice to imagine, anyway.

 

Missing you,

Steve

 

_________

 

Natasha led the way into a nondescript storefront under an elevated subway rail. Blocky cyrillic letters blared out in garish yellow on a turquoise-colored awning. “You’re going to love it,” she assured him as she ushered him in.

They’d taken the Q train to Brighton Beach after Nat promised she was going to serve him the best chicken Kiev outside of Kiev. Steve knew a ploy to get him outside of the tower when he heard one but came along anyway. They’d spent the morning at a bar on the boardwalk where Steve had been the odd one out for not sipping on vodka before noon, then wandered in and out of shops. At a bookstore brimming with matryoshka and kitschy souvenirs, Steve had insisted on buying her an oversized t-shirt with the words _Trust me, I’m a Russian spy_ in a hideous typeface as payback for dragging him out with her. “I’ll know if you don’t at least wear it as pajamas, Romanoff,” he insisted. At a specialty grocery store he’d filled his tote bag with chocolate-covered apricots, grape molasses, and other ingredients he had no idea what he was going to do with.

“Wanna tell me the real reason we’re out here?” Steve asked when they’d gotten their food from the counter and slid into a plastic-laminated booth, their shopping bags and winter coats piling into barriers around them on the bench seats.

“Maybe I just wanted to hang out before we head back to DC.” Steve was still learning how to read Natasha. She shrugged a little when she said it, and her voice was light and easy. Her smirk seemed a little pinched, but her eyes were twinkling and friendly.

“I really don’t need people checking up on me all the time,” Steve said, turning his gaze back to the gooey salad of potatoes, pickles, bologna, and eggs in front of him.

“Doesn’t mean we don’t like to see how you’re doing,” Natasha replied. “Try this.” She handed him a round, floury dumpling.

Steve obligingly gobbled it in a couple bites, then had to dive for a napkin when it started leaking down his face. The beef filling was perfectly cooked and very juicy. “It’s good,” he agreed.

They ate in silence for some time before Steve tried again. “Maybe it’d be easier to believe you want to spend time with me if you talked more.”

“I’m not a big talker,” she said simply. “I don’t think you are most of the time, either.”

Steve shrugged and took a bite of his chicken.

“Not lying to people is my way of showing friendship,” Natasha said after a moment.

“And is silence the only way you have of not lying to people?” Steve asked.

“Not the only way.” She smirked more widely now. “I like you, Steve. You’ve never hit on me, and you act like you trust me. I like going on missions with you. I like that you know when to call Barton on his bullshit and when to let him be. And I think you know what it’s like to be more than one person.”

“I’m just me.”

“Sure,” she said easily. “But no one else knows that, do they?”

Steve could admit that she was right about that. And that she probably knew a thing or two about it herself.

After they piled their warm layers back on and made their way out of the cafe, they stopped at a shop to get bathing suits and flip flops, then ended up in a Russian steam room. It was growing dark when they emerged, sweating in their winter clothes from the abrupt change of temperature. Natasha spoke rarely, mostly just to offer directions or instructions, and Steve replied in kind. After a final stop to pick up some baklava to share with the rest of the team, they got back on the subway and headed home in a companionable silence.

 

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

It’s all blurring together and I wish you, the you I used to know, were here to talk me through it. Because I want to tell you everything that’s happened and I keep thinking that you’ve already seen it on the news and I went to tell you about it yesterday but that was the you in bed at the nursing home and that isn’t who I’m writing to.

I’m sorry about SHIELD. But I know you’d agree I did what I had to. It stopped being what you’d built it to be.

I should have seen it coming. I should have known something wasn’t right with the STRIKE team. I didn’t want to, I guess.

You told me to allow Bucky the dignity of his choice and I think about that every day. But now he’s alive and I don’t know if he’s made a single choice of his own since that day on the train.

He’s out there and I keep thinking he needs me. I’m so used to it being the other way around that I can’t tell if it’s true or not. They call him the Winter Soldier and he doesn’t even remember his own name. I think he remembered _me_ , for a second.

Sam’s going to help me find him. I wish you could’ve met Sam, you would’ve loved him. There I go again—the real you met him yesterday, too.

I wasn’t looking to make new friends in this century but they keep finding me anyway. I’ve spent so much time feeling sorry for myself and now I can’t stop thinking how lucky I am. To have these friends and my own choices and my real team.

I hope you had that too.

 

Yours,

Steve

 

_________

 

“Capitan!” Tony looked up from the holographic keyboard hovering before him. A set of symbols Steve didn’t recognize arranged in squares and arcs under Tony’s fingers. “I was just about to ask JARVIS to get you down here.”

“What’s up?” Steve asked, taking in the dazzling lights filling the workshop. He’d only been there a handful of times, usually to get changes to his uniform or collect Tony for training or an outing. He’d gotten the feeling it was Tony’s sanctum, and he didn’t want to invade the space.

Tony swiped a hand in a smooth, decisive gesture, like a symphony conductor. Several of the holograms in front of him collapsed in on themselves and then vanished. He gestured again, but this time it was for Steve’s benefit—he indicated a steel table where Sam’s Falcon wings were laid out. “Finished working on your buddy’s gear and thought we could talk strategy. Did you see the brief Hill sent you?”

In the few weeks since SHIELD had fallen, Maria Hill and Tony had somehow begun creating the infrastructure for an independent Avengers team. A horde of lawyers was working with the state department and the Secretary of Defense and the UN to establish their authority to operate in the absence of SHIELD and the World Security Council. The brief had included a rundown of all of this, as well as a summary of Tony’s efforts so far to hack into what was left of Hydra, the algorithms he’d set up to track Bucky, and an outline of how the team would proceed with searching for him.

“I did,” Steve said, trying not to linger too much on the thin tank top Tony was wearing or his bare arms. “It looks great, Tony.”

The hopeful smile Tony offered him in answer seemed completely out of proportion to what Steve had said, and likewise filled Steve with a completely distracting warmth that he tried, and mostly failed, to clamp down on. “Yeah?” Tony breathed. “Got any suggestions? Corrections?”

“Nope,” Steve said, wondering when he was going to come up with words greater than one syllable.

Tony cocked his head, and Steve tried not to stare at the muscles of his throat. “None at all?”

Steve shrugged, feeling embarrassed for several reasons now. “I don’t really know what I’m doing with all this. I haven’t run a mission like this before. I’m not exactly a covert intelligence agent.” He smiled a little, remembering his attempts at stealth while working with Natasha. “I’ve always had an organization or at least other people backing me up for that. I really appreciate all the work you’ve done.”

“Oh.” Tony blanched slightly, then waved a hand in dismissal. “It’s nothing, Cap. Least I could do.”

“Is it really Avengers business, though?” Steve asked, pursing his lips.

Tony gaped at that. “Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be?”

“I mean, it’s kind of personal,” Steve replied, his gaze fixed on Tony’s flickering eyes.

“It can be personal and a matter of international security too,” Tony said after a moment. “You and Barnes, huh?”

Steve stared, frowning, before he realized what Tony was saying. “Oh! Um, no. Not—we were always just friends. I just meant, I’m still, you know, emotionally compromised.”

“Aren’t we all?” Tony said, bending over to pick at something Steve couldn’t see on the Falcon wings.

“Why’d you want me to come down?” Steve asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Hmm? Oh, I thought we could go over the plan. Honestly, I thought you were going to tear it apart, and I’d be spending the rest of the night redoing the whole thing.” Tony’s brow creased as he turned back to look at Steve. “Why’d you come down here if not to talk about that?”

“Right, um—there’s a new restaurant over by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I thought I’d see if you wanted to get dinner? It’s Australian. I’ve never had kangaroo, and you’re always getting me to try new foods, and I thought maybe you hadn’t had it either, and we could both try something new.” Great, he’d gone from monosyllabic to nonstop babbling. “I mean, if you’re not busy, you probably have lots to do—”

“I’m all done actually,” Tony said quickly. “Like I said, thought I’d be spending my night reworking everything, so I’m free.”

“Great,” Steve said, nodding firmly.

“I’ll meet you in the garage in—lesse, uh, I gotta change so—half an hour?”

Steve shook his head, smiling. “It’s five blocks away Tony, I thought we’d walk.”

“It’s also, like, negative twenty degrees outside!”

“And how far away would we have to park if we took a car?” Steve pointed out.

Tony rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine. Only because I know you’re a gentleman and will offer me your jacket when I get cold. But this better be some delicious kangaroo, Rogers.”

Steve grinned over his shoulder on the way to the elevator. “I'll come get you in thirty, Tony.”

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

I should probably stop writing you, now that you’re not dead. I guess it’s not you I’m really writing to, any more than my letters to Peggy are to her.

None of the things I imagined for you if you were alive were right, were they.

But maybe they can be, someday?

I can’t lose you again, Buck. I can’t let anything happen to you. Not when I’m just starting to do alright out here. It’s so selfish of me, but I can’t bear to find you and then go without you all over again. I need you to be alright, I need you to be safe.

JARVIS found security footage of you at the Smithsonian. I was only a few miles away in the hospital, and you were right there. Do you remember now? Will you ever remember? I know it won’t be the same, it can’t ever be the same, nothing will, but after everything you’ve been through… I just need to know that you’re safe. Please let me find you. We’ll find a new way for everything, somehow.

 

Steve

 

_________

 

“Nope, no way, I am never playing Monopoly with you people again,” Sam said firmly.

“Oh my god, I thought he would never shut up,” Clint agreed, clinking his beer with Sam’s.

“I wasn’t that bad,” Steve grumbled.

Sam scoffed. “Dude, you spent half an hour telling us about the anti-capitalist origins of the game and another half hour about how Parker Brothers cheated the woman who designed it.”

Steve clenched his jaw. “I just think the game makes a lot more sense when you see the income disparity as part of the point instead of—”

“Whatever,” Tony said, plopping himself down heavily beside Steve. Steve felt the weight of the couch shift around him and marveled that Tony’s drink hadn’t spilled a drop. “You’re all just upset because I fucking dominated last time we played. No need to bring Cap’s radical socialism into it again.”

“Speak for yourself, I love hearing about Steve’s politics,” Natasha said, her eyes sparkling. “Now if only we could get him going in front of the press.”

“I would pay good money for that,” Tony agreed, saluting Natasha with his martini glass.

“My favorite is when he talks about unions,” Bruce said, chewing on a bottom lip that was curling into a small smile.

“Mine is the military-industrial complex,” Natasha confided.

“We could play poker,” Clint suggested.

Sam shook his head. “Not with these cheaters, I’m not an idiot.”

“I don’t count cards on _purpose_ ,” Tony grumbled, just as Steve said, “If you don’t catch me stacking the deck, did it really happen?”

“Here’s an idea,” Bruce offered. “We don’t have to play a game at all.”

“Blasphemy,” Clint said, shaking his head.

“But it’s game night,” Thor said, a bit of a whine entering his voice.

“We could try this crazy thing where we just hang out and talk to each other,” Bruce went on.

“Um, is the no shop talk rule still in effect?” Clint squinted. “Cuz if so…” he trailed off and threw up his hands as if to say, _not gonna happen_.

“You think we can’t all hang out and just talk to each other without talking shop?” Natasha asked. “Is that a challenge, Barton?”

“Oh, it is now, Romanoff.” Clint grinned. “What’re the stakes?”

Bruce rubbed his face with his hands. “Did this just become a betting game?”

“Clint and Nat are welcome to bet, I’m out,” Tony said. “Money is meaningless to me. Gambling lost its charm years ago.”

“Let’s play two truths and a lie,” Sam suggested.

Clint pumped a fist in the air. “Yes!”

Tony scowled. “Unfair, spies have an advantage!”

Natasha kicked Tony in the ankle. “Shut it Stark, you just said you’re not playing for money.”

“But still no shop talk,” Clint said slowly, realization dawning.

Natasha smiled wickedly. “That’s right.”

“Let’s play!” Thor said eagerly. “How do we play?”

“We go one at a time. Whoever’s turn it is says three statements about themselves. Two are true and one isn’t, everyone else guesses which is which, and then they tell us who’s right,” Sam explained. “Someone who isn’t Thor go first to show him how it’s done.”

“I’ll start,” Bruce offered. “Okay, how’s this. I have seven PHDs; I became vegetarian because of a girl I was seeing; I was vegetarian for three years after we broke up.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Fucking lame, Bruce, your lie is a technicality?” Bruce met Tony’s eyes challengingly. “I listen when you say things, you were vegetarian for _four_ years after you broke up.”

Bruce broke into a wide smile. “Yeah, it was four years.”

“You’re terrible at this game,” Natasha said.

“I thought the point was it’s not something you can be bad at,” Steve mused.

“It’s not something you can lose, you can definitely be bad at it,” Tony said. “I won the last round so it’s my turn.”

“You didn’t even let anyone else guess,” Clint said.

“Yet I won,” Tony insisted. “Okay mine have numbers in them too but that won’t be what makes them a truth or a lie, because I’m not lame like Bruce. Six of my long-ish-term relationships turned out to be with corporate spies; I have gone out with two different academy award winners for best actress; I dated a guy for three years and then had to bribe him to keep it out of the press.”

Natasha examined him. “Six does seem high. But then, it’s you, and you’re an idiot.”

Clint chewed on his lip. “Name the actresses,” he demanded.

“That would be cheating,” Tony replied, raising his eyebrows and taking a pointed sip of his drink.

“Why are all of yours about dating?” Bruce asked.

“Not much came to mind that wasn’t shop talk,” Tony said. “Anyone going to make a guess?”

“Well the one about dating a man is definitely true,” Thor said.

“Definitely?” Bruce asked.

“I have a sense about these things,” Thor insisted.

Clint chuckled. “What, about bisexuality?”

“Yes,” Thor said firmly.

“If you had to pay him off it would explain why you don’t usually talk about it,” Natasha said, still watching Tony’s face. Steve found he couldn’t take his eyes off it himself. Since that day on 7th Avenue, Steve had spent a lot of time assuring himself that Tony just wasn’t into men, and now, well. He knew which one he wanted to be the lie.

“I think it’s the corporate spy one,” Clint said. “Pepper wouldn’t let that many people slip through, and he said it’s not the number that’s the lie. So: no one he’s dated was after SI secrets.”

“It’s the actress one,” Bruce said.

“Yeah, I say actresses too,” Steve said after a moment.

“Same here,” Natasha agreed.

“Actresses,” Sam chimed in.

“Anyone else?” Tony asked, his eyes flicking around the room. “Yeah, I’ve only bagged an academy award _nominee,_ I’m afraid.”

“Why’d you have to pay off the scumbag?” Clint asked over his shoulder as he got up to get another beer.  “Couldn’t you pay the press to not cover it, instead?”

“I didn’t give him money, I gave him tech,” Tony corrected. “And it’s because he kinda _is_ the press. He’s sort of the CEO of a media conglomerate.”

“Why didn’t you just make it public?” Thor asked.

“I might, these days,” Tony said. “This was forever ago, Obie convinced me it would tank the stocks.”

“Wait,” Steve said. “That means you dated six women who were just after your company secrets?”

Tony smiled a brilliant, brittle smile. “Hazard of the job. Only one of them tried to have me killed.”

Steve couldn’t figure out how to wrap his head around that. He was still trying to process the fact that Tony dated men. Or, had dated _a_ man, once.

Natasha’s eyes still hadn’t left Tony’s face. “The media guy. He was one of the people after SI secrets.”

Steve felt Tony tense beside him on the couch. “You’re creepy, you know that?”

“Uh, does this count as shop talk?” Bruce asked after a moment.

“I’ll go next!” Thor said. “I understand the rules now. I have defeated an entire army single-handedly. I have tasted the blood of my fallen enemies. I have lain with both men and women.”

“Shop talk!” Clint pointed at Thor. “Thor loses!”

“I’ll allow it,” Natasha said. “It’s not Avengers-related, and that’s kind of just Thor’s life. And Thor, we all know you’ve been with guys. You’re supposed to pick something more difficult.”

“It’s the army thing,” Bruce said. “Not that I think you couldn’t,” he added quickly, at Thor’s quirked eyebrow. “I just don’t think your dad or your friends would’ve let you go off and fight a whole army by yourself.”

“I’m going with the blood,” Tony said. “Unless you mean, like, some got in your mouth or something while you were smashing them with your hammer? Incredibly icky, by the way.”

“Yeah, definitely the blood drinking,” Sam agreed.

“Army thing,” Clint said, nodding at Bruce. “Asgardians totally seem like the type to ritualistically drink the blood of their kills.”

Thor threw back his head and laughed. “That is so gross, Clint, of course we don’t do that!” Clint scowled and sat down again with his fresh beer and a bag of microwave popcorn.

“Congratulations Clint, you’re even worse than Bruce at this game,” Tony said. Clint threw a beer cap at Tony’s head.

“A whole army, huh?” Steve asked.

“It was a small army,” Thor said dismissively. “The Warriors Three were at a party they didn’t want to leave, Sif was hunting, Loki was being invisible, I was in a hurry, it was a great time. Any of you could’ve done the same, I’m sure.”

Over the course of the evening, Steve learned that Natasha could eat two pizzas on her own in one sitting, that Clint hadn’t learned to read until he was 10 years old, and that Sam’s cousin worked as a stylist on a popular reality TV makeover show. Tony’s first visit to a gun range was at age 7, Thor picked up a sword before learning how to walk, Natasha was trained in ballet but hated watching it being performed, Sam had never read _Harry Potter_ , and Bruce had skipped his high school prom to take his girlfriend to a Madonna concert instead.

When it was Steve’s turn, he was at a loss for what to say. When he wasn’t staring at Tony—watching his shirt ride up over his stomach as he shifted in his seat, noticing how he cascaded his fingers one at a time along the stem of his glass, taking in the cadence of his voice, reveling in his laugh—he was thinking about Bucky. Bucky was alive: truth. Bucky was alive: lie. Bucky was dead: truth. Bucky was dead: lie. Bucky or the Winter Soldier or someone in-between was out there and didn’t want Steve to find him: truth.

He pressed further, trying to remember things about his life before the ice. It wasn’t usually so hard. Sometimes it felt like that was all he did. But now everything was still coming up Bucky.

Bucky made fun of Steve for picking fruit off the trees in parks and along the sidewalk but ended up eating most of what Steve picked, anyway: truth. Bucky once had a factory job taking the pits out of cherries: truth. Bucky brought jars of maraschino cherries back from work and shared them with Steve: lie, Bucky said seeing what went into them ruined them forever. Whenever they walked by Fort Hamilton as kids, Bucky would talk about becoming a soldier someday: truth. He and Bucky had played under the bridge across the Narrows that connected Bay Ridge to Staten Island: lie, that bridge was built in the 60’s.

Finally, Steve spoke. “When I was with the USO show, I dated one of the dancers, Viola. I’ve been to all 50 states. I used to repair my own uniform.”

“States,” Clint said immediately. He opened a loud, crinkly bag of chips he’d pulled from somewhere and started munching on them even more loudly.

“I was going to say states too, but past evidence suggests disagreeing with Clint is a better bet,” Bruce said thoughtfully. “So I’ll say uniform.”

Tony pinned Steve with his gaze. Steve tried not to squirm. It seemed a perfect moment to stare back, to enjoy the curve of Tony’s jawline, to imagine pressing a kiss on one cheek, to watch how full and bright his eyes were as they darted over Steve’s face. “Viola. Fake.”

“Agreed,” Natasha chimed in. Steve realized she’d been watching him too and hurried to look away from Tony’s face. “You didn’t date anyone from the USO.”

“I’m with Bruce,” Thor said.

“I'll take Bruce’s guess too,” Sam said.

Steve managed a smile. “Nat and Tony are right. Viola didn’t think much of me, actually. She hated my acting.” She’d actually been one of the few of the dancers who hadn’t wanted to step out with him. Or stay in with him, that had been on offer more than once, too. None of them had been impressed by his acting, of course, but several had been dazzled by his muscles and by the growing phenomenon of Captain America.

“You’ve seriously been to 50 states? When did you see Alaska?” Clint griped.

“There was a STRIKE thing.” Steve didn’t particularly want to think about it.

“What, was there a terrorist moose?” Clint rolled his eyes and shoved another noisy handful of chips into his mouth, covering his hands with orange powder.

“Radically militant herd of caribou,” Steve corrected. “I think it’s Bruce’s turn again.”

Bruce’s next list was of purported favorite foods, among which Tony once again immediately identified the lie. Steve listened to Tony’s chuckle, smiled at his tipsy giggling, savored his full-belly laugh. Steve found himself laughing sometimes, too. He didn’t think about Bucky for the rest of the night.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Sam keeps saying I need a hobby besides looking for you and that making moon eyes at Tony doesn’t count. I told him that I read and draw—because I have been drawing, in the last month or two, mostly just things I can see from my window, or pigeons and sparrows I see in the park—and he said that’s not enough. He can be really bossy sometimes. Kinda like you.

He caught me saving a piece of the Monopoly money that Clint tore up when he got fed up the last time we played, so I ended up telling Sam about my keepsake box, and now he’s saying I should get into scrapbooking. He laughed when he said it, which I think is because it’s mostly older women who do it.  He took me to a scrapbooking store yesterday and it was all middle-aged women shopping and working there except for one young man with pink hair who was at the register.

But it turns out that scrapbooking is great, okay, it’s very calming and precise and you should come here so you can make fun of me for it along with Sam.

They sell little plastic envelopes in all different sizes, so you can put things like ticket stubs or old buttons in them and they won’t get damaged. I have special scissors for different kinds of paper and a special little photo printer just for making copies of pictures I want to put in the scrapbook. People make videos and put them online about how to best preserve the items you put in your scrapbook, what glues to use and what kinds of paper and how to protect the corners of bits of paper. I have one book for the things I saved before I woke up here, and one for everything I saved after. And the scrapbooks themselves are just great, you can take the pages out and move them around and change the order whenever you want. At first I tried to arrange everything by date, but now I have it organized just by what looks nice.

I don’t even feel that guilty about not looking for you when I’m working on it, because I’m remembering you instead. Or not remembering, not only, and not just you, and not just times from before the ice. I’m processing it, Sam would say. Celebrating it, is more what I would say.

 

Hoping we can celebrate your return soon,

Steve

 

_________

 

“Let’s go home,” Steve had said earlier that afternoon as the team headed toward the quinjet. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now the word echoed in his head. _Home._

Because the tower had become his home. He sat in the living area of his suite, taking in the area above the lavish fireplace where he’d hung a gallery wall of framed photos. One weekend during a lull in intel on Bucky, he’d gone through all the pictures he could find from his past and all of the ones JARVIS thought he’d like from his present, picked his favorites, and used holograms to lay out an arrangement on the wall. Black and white images were interspersed with the color ones—a group shot of the Commandos beside a copy of the oil portrait of Peggy that had hung in the triskelion, candid photos of the Avengers culled from magazines and social media, posed shots of the team in Central Park. In the center, in the silver frame Clint had given him for his birthday, was Steve’s favorite: a snapshot from the end of a battle, Steve still in full uniform with the shield on his back, his cowl pulled down and his hair greasy with sweat, Tony in his armor and the faceplate up, his head tilted back in a hearty laugh that Steve liked to imagine was reserved just for him.

Another wall held a collection of WPA posters, some Steve had worked on and some he hadn’t: keep your fire escapes clear; reduce fire hazard through planned housing; cure juvenile delinquency; help keep your neighborhood clean. By the door hung a copy of a Matisse painting—at least three times larger than the original—of golden-yellow lemons and a vase bursting with flowers in front of a bold red background. Elsewhere across his rooms were framed covers from _Amazing Stories_ magazine and _Flash Gordon,_ an oversized poster of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” written in calligraphic swirls, a canvas with one of his own paintings of the Williamsburg bridge.

His shelves were full of books, with smaller photo frames leaning against them and knick-knacks mixed in with the bookends. Here and there were shadow boxes containing keepsakes that were too bulky for his scrapbooks. One held the St. Patrick medal he’d gotten for his First Communion, another a rusted pair of sewing scissors he’d rescued from the trash after his ma had given up on them, while a third one was full to the top with chestnut shells. He’d collected the nuts from trees on the city streets to fill out a soup his ma was making, on one of the days she’d been short on grocery money.

That sort of excursion had happened many times—she’d send him off with five cents to stretch as far as he could, and he’d come back with carrot tops from the produce market, a bone from the butcher he’d said he was buying for a dog, and handfuls of dandelion greens and ramps he’d picked at the park. But the day with the chestnuts had been a good day, a sunny one in early October when it was for once not too hot or cold. He always kept an eye on the chestnut trees that lined a street a few blocks from their apartment, but it was hard to time harvesting them. He needed to catch them right when they were ready to fall off the tree in the slightest breeze but hadn’t actually done so yet. More than one autumn the window had passed him by, and he’d stopped by the trees to find all of the chestnuts crushed on the sidewalk, being pecked at by birds. That time, though, they’d been perfect. One tree had even had a little notch in its trunk from where a long-ago branch had been trimmed off, and Steve had been able to balance on it to reach up and pluck nut after nut from the boughs. He’d returned home in triumph. His ma had put him in charge of roasting them in the oven and then carefully peeling them while she switched between her mending and preparing the rest of the soup, all the while singing the songs her own mother had taught her in Ireland.

There was even an empty beer bottle on one of his end tables, leftover from the last team movie night, as well as a bowl of fruit on the counter, a bag of art supplies he hadn’t unpacked yet taking up a seat on a couch, and several haphazard stacks of mail that had made their way through screening to reach him. It looked like someone lived there. It looked like _Steve_ lived there, like it was his home.

 

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

It was great to see you last week. I read the LeGuin you gave me, but I’ll wait to tell you about what I think in person.

We haven’t made anything public yet but Bucky showed up at the tower earlier tonight. You’re the only person I’ve told who isn’t on the team. I hope we can both come visit you soon, he said he’d love to see you again.

I’m trying to write to people more, especially since I can’t visit you as often as I’d like. If you’re up to it I’d love to hear from you, too.

 

Best,

Steve

 

PS: Tony says the encryption on your email is the best there is and not to worry about spilling any state secrets you want.

 

_________

 

Dear Steve,

 

That’s so wonderful. I knew he’d find his way back to you. It would be lovely to see you both, whenever you’re ready. Tell Tony I wouldn’t mind a visit from him either.

And of course you can write to me. I might not always be able to write much back, but I love hearing from you, Steve, even if the only things I have to say might seem frightfully boring to you.

Did Sgt. Barnes say anything about where he’s been all this time? He’d better have a good excuse for not heading straight for you. You aren’t exactly hard to spot, are you, in that big gaudy tower.

And why are you writing to me instead of being by his side? You aren’t hiding, are you?

 

Peggy

 

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

He said he was in Westchester County working with an associate of his who helped him recover his memories and get rid of Hydra’s conditioning and that we should run all the tests we want to confirm Professor Xavier’s good work. Bruce and Tony are doing that right now and I’m not allowed to be in there while they do the scans, so JARVIS is just showing me on the monitors. Maria Hill has some contacts who are going to help verify everything too.

Tony already set up a whole suite for Bucky. He likes to be prepared for anything, he said. It’s next to mine, and Bucky grumbled about being roommates with me again, but I think he’s actually really pleased. I’m not sure anymore, though, I don’t know if I could tell if he was just trying to be polite or what. That’s where I am now, in the suite. I said I would get it ready for him, but there’s not really anything to do. I brought over one of my potted plants so there’s something alive in here, and I filled up the fridge with fresh groceries, but mostly I’ve just been sitting here watching Bruce and Tony run tests I don’t understand.

And I might be hiding a little, Peggy. What can I even say to him?

 

Steve

 

_________

 

Oh Steve. Just talk to him. You’ll figure out the rest as you go.

 

Peggy

 

_________

 

“Christ, Buck, did you sleep at all?”

Bucky looked up from the book he’d been reading to glare at Steve. “Yeah, you look like shit too, Rogers.”

That, at least, was familiar enough. Steve examined the bags under Bucky’s eyes, the tense set of his jaw. Steve swung himself onto the couch beside him, the leather squeaking and settling around them. “When I can’t sleep,” he said after a moment. “There’s this playlist JARVIS has. It helps sometimes.”

“The ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ one? Yeah, Stark showed it to me.”

“He did?” Steve hadn’t known they’d been spending any time together. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Or about how Bucky clearly knew the playlist had been Tony’s in the first place. Steve had thought, maybe, that was something Tony had shared only with him.

The crease in Bucky’s brow increased but his lip quirked to one side. “I’ll have you know I’m very charming and likable.” Steve punched him companionably in the shoulder. “He’s been running some diagnostics on the arm. And trying to get me to watch the Terminator movies.”

That was good, Steve thought, that they were spending time together. Once the thought had finished, though, he wondered which of them it was supposed to be good for. He didn’t mean to patronize Bucky like that, he was just worried, and still learning how to talk to him again. Sometimes words came to him without him needing to contemplate them, but other times it was like he was seeing a stranger with Bucky’s face—or worse, like seeing a revenant.

“Hey,” Steve said after a moment. “Do you remember that time the Dodgers were gonna beat the Reds, but then the ump said two of ‘em were safe when they were clearly out?”

“Hell yeah I remember,” Bucky said. “1940, right? That was the time that guy rushed the field and started wailing on the umpire.”

“Can’t say I blamed him.”

“They were fucking robbed,” Bucky agreed. He looked sidelong at Steve. “Was that a test?”

Steve bit his lip. “Wasn’t supposed to be. I was more just wondering if you still liked baseball.”

“You’re an idiot, Rogers.” Bucky shook his head. “I think even the Winter Soldier liked baseball.”

“Wanna watch the ’55 World Series highlights, then?”

“I dunno, do I?”

“The Bums beat the Yankees. They were still in Brooklyn, too.”

“Then hell yes. JARVIS?”

The nearest screen lit up and began playing. Steve settled into the couch and felt Bucky do the same beside him.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

Now I should _really_ stop writing to you, now that you are not only not dead but also  living down the hall from me. Well, too bad, bud. It helps me clear my head, and I’m still not always sure what things I can say to the real you.

So there’s this luncheonette that hasn’t remodeled since Roosevelt was president, and Tony said he’d been meaning to take me there ever since he met me, so he dragged me and you and Sam there yesterday. It was your first time out of the tower since the press conference, and I could tell you were nervous and pretending not to be, but we just ended up having egg creams and burgers and arguing over portions because we hadn’t ordered enough fries. It was nice to drink soda out of a glass bottle, I guess, but the weird thing is that that didn’t feel like home anymore.

I think that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t feel like it should be. Shouldn’t I miss everyone who’s gone? And it’s not like everything is perfect or even all that much better in this century. Not that people did everything right back then or anything—Sam keeps telling me about how people like to assume that history follows some linear trajectory where things only ever get better and no one talks about how everything just changes all the time, and some things get better, and some get worse and then better again, and some things just disappear forever.

I thought things would be easy once I had you back, and I guess some things are. It’s actually easier to talk to you than I thought it would be. Well, sometimes it is. Sometimes I don’t know what to say at all, and I just don’t say anything, and I can’t even tell if you hate that or not.

You said that sometimes you feel like you’re the Winter Soldier, remembering everything Bucky does, and sometimes you’re Bucky remembering everything the Soldier did, but on good days you’re just James Barnes who knows about both and you can go about your life, and I wish that didn’t make so much sense to me. Because I see it, I think, when you’re one or the other. And so when you’re Bucky, I know what I can say to you because you’re the guy I knew growing up, and when you’re not, I don’t know what to talk about and sometimes I just want to throw myself to the ground and apologize for letting you fall.

Natasha said that I’m just one person, but everyone looks at me expecting me to be Captain America. I don’t want to be him, but I don’t want to fail anyone else, either. Lately I’m hoping I haven’t failed as many as I thought I had, at least.

 

Steve

 

_________

 

“I heard there was pie, where’s the pie?”

Steve looked up from the pie crust he was rolling out to see Tony, his hip cocked to lean against the counter, reaching for a strawberry. “Hey!” Steve slapped his hand away. Tony ignored him and popped the fruit into his mouth, looking unrepentant. “It’ll be even longer before it’s done if you keep eating the filling.”

Tony hoisted himself up to sit on a clear bit of countertop, already grabbing another strawberry. “Rogers, are you making a pie with _vegetables_?” He wrinkled his nose. He was wearing dress pants and socks, a silk shirt, and a waistcoat, though his shoes and jacket were nowhere to be found. The top few buttons of his collar were undone, too, exposing a smooth swath of skin and the lines of his clavicle. If he’d been wearing a tie, it was absent as well. Steve wondered if he was coming from or preparing for meetings or just taking a break from them.

“It’s rhubarb. My ma used to make a pie like this every spring, as soon as it was in season,” Steve explained, setting aside his rolling pin. “But if I knew you hated it so much I would’ve made it sooner. I’m tired of you eating all my baked goods before I get any.”

“Harsh,” Tony said, though he didn’t look particularly concerned. He leaned into Steve’s space to grab at a wedge of navel orange, uncaring of the juice sluicing down his forearm, almost reaching his elbow, where his shirtsleeves were rolled haphazardly. “I’m betting I actually love rhubarb pie. Does it go with coffee?”

“You think everything goes with coffee,” Steve replied, wondering if his voice sounded as fond to Tony as it did to him. He didn’t want to make Tony uncomfortable, but Tony was the one who had his thighs practically in Steve’s face as he bent over to cut a circle out of the dough, so he was having trouble showing his usual restraint. “And coffee is not an appropriate meal substitute.”

“I know.” Tony grinned, and it was only thanks to Steve’s quick reflexes that he didn’t slip and knick himself with the knife, he was so distracted by that dazzling smile. How did Tony _do that_ with his eyes? “I have a poster in my workshop that says so. Thanks, by the way.”

Steve ducked his head and fixated on using the parchment paper under the dough to flip it onto a pie pan. He pressed it lightly against the sides. “You gave me the inspiration, reminding me about the work I used to do. And JARVIS did a lot of it.”

Remembering his designs for the WPA, Steve had started a series of silly posters about lab safety and sleep hygiene to go in Tony’s workshop. His latest idea was about Asimov’s laws of robotics. He’d gone down to the workshop a couple days earlier to see if Tony wanted to try the new raw food bistro by Bryant Park and he’d been surprised to see that Tony had actually hung the completed one over Dum-E’s charging station. It was one of the first digital pieces Steve had finished, and he was proud of it. Drawing with an electronic tablet took some getting used to, but he loved being able to use the eyedropper tool to exactly copy the colors from the old posters. He’d never learned to silkscreen, himself, but JARVIS had helped him get the texture just right so it had the look he wanted.

“What else is going in this pie?” Tony asked, snatching at the ragged edges of the remaining pie dough.

Steve tried not to stare too much as Tony popped the dough into his mouth and then licked the flour off his fingers. Could someone have a beautiful tongue? It was probably just that Steve thought everything about Tony was beautiful. Yeah, he had to stop that train of thought, right now. “How d’you know I didn’t need that for the topping?” he grumbled instead.

“Cuz you’re already crimping the edges,” Tony said, swinging his legs back and forth and reaching over Steve’s chest once more to snag a slice of banana.

Steve resisted the urge to grab Tony’s hand and just hold it in his own, to run his fingers over Tony’s knuckles and veins and blunted fingernails. He focused instead on pressing the tines of a fork into the edges of his crust. “I was going to top it with a meringue,” he said finally.

“Fuck yeah. Well, I’ve tried all of your fillings except for the rhubarb, so I’m calling it, I love this pie.”

Steve kept expecting Tony to have to return to his meetings or get to work in his lab, but instead he stayed in his spot on the counter, bouncing energetically and “taste-testing” the filling as Steve assembled it. They bickered over the Avengers’ training schedules while Steve cooked the rhubarb with sugar. Tony explained the principles of the cloaking tech he was making for the new quinjets, which segued into him using kitchen utensils to re-enact a classic episode of the original series of Star Trek.

“So, Kirk has the ship playing possum when—” Tony broke off, still holding up the pizza wheel that represented the _Enterprise_. “What?”

Steve’s brain stuttered. He’d been staring again, so much so that Tony noticed. The _what_ was that he wanted very much to kiss Tony. That he couldn’t stop wondering what Tony would taste like, how much of it would be spring fruits and floury dough and how much of it would be just Tony. “You have flour in your beard,” he said at last. “You just aged twenty years.”

Tony pouted and tossed pie dough at Steve’s head. “Well, you have dough in your hair.”

Steve grinned and threw a strawberry stem at Tony’s forehead. Tony sputtered and jumped down from the counter, snatching a banana peel from Steve’s compost pile.

The food fight that ensued ended up using most of the filling for the second pie that Steve had planned. Steve lamented that the cutting board he was employing as a shield didn’t have a very good grip, while Tony complained that the spoon he was using to launch fruit in Steve’s direction wasn’t correctly balanced. It came to a close when the oven dinged to indicate it was pre-heated and ready for the prepared pie, and Steve realized he hadn’t even started on the topping yet.

He put the pan in the oven so the filling could start cooking and set to work on the meringue. It turned out that Tony didn’t know how to separate eggs. They went through more than the pair of eggs Steve had set aside for the purpose while he learned. When Steve explained why room-temperature egg whites were better, Tony made guesses as to the chemistry behind it. He made fun of Steve for using the hand mixer and mused aloud on how to best automate the process of preparing meringue. When the pie went in, Tony insisted on turning on the oven light and watching the topping shrink.

When the pie was finally finished and Steve was curling the peaks of the meringue, there were eggshells all over the kitchen, banana smushed into Steve’s shirt, a strawberry juice stain on Tony’s sleeve, and Steve couldn’t stop smiling.

 

_________

 

Dear Peggy,

 

I’m just an open book to you, aren’t I? Yeah, it’s Tony. Has been for a while now.

I told you how I used to see two people when I looked at you. I’d like to take credit for seeing just the one, now, but I’m pretty sure it’s just that you’re too stubborn to let me see you as anything that you aren’t.

Sometimes Natasha and Bucky are like these ghosts that live outside their bodies and I don’t ever know who I’m talking to. Even Sam, not as often, but still sometimes, like when he does his counselor voice or when he doesn’t want to talk about Riley. Or Clint when he’s hiding everything he’s feeling about what Loki did. I don’t know. Tony’s pretty much the only person I can look at these days and just see one person instead of two or three or five. Other than Thor maybe, but he’s an exception to most things.

Tony’s so himself when he’s with me, or the team. He has his persona he puts on for the press and the public, but it doesn’t feel like another person, more like a mask that he wears. And it’s not like Tony doesn’t have topics he likes to avoid or that kind of thing. I just mean—he’s always barreling forward, to the future, I guess, and when I see him I think sometimes I can see it too.  

 

Thinking of you,

Steve

 

_________

 

“Oh my god, is this about Hart Crane again?” Bucky rolled his eyes and popped a piece of cereal into his mouth.

“So what if it is?” Steve grumbled. “And use a spoon, you’re disgusting.”

“Who’s Hart Crane?” Tony asked as he came in and made a beeline for the coffeemaker, wearing a fluffy bathrobe and clutching an empty mug. “And is being a morning person a gross super soldier side effect, because, hey: I hate it.”

“Just Steve’s favorite poet and celebrity crush,” Bucky said.

“Shuddup, Bucky.” Steve crossed his arms. “He’s not my celebrity crush. And he’s been dead since 1932.”

“Anything I’d’ve heard of?” Tony asked. Steve watched him make some sort of complicated sigil on the touchscreen of the coffeemaker and found himself transfixed with the crook of Tony’s elbow, the way his hair fell and curled at the back of his head, the screwdriver handle that peeked out of the corner of one pocket of the robe.  

“Why, you a poetry buff?” Bucky looked at Tony skeptically over his glass of orange juice.

“Can’t say I am,” Tony admitted, tapping one foot and watching the pitcher quickly fill with coffee.

Steve cleared his throat. “ _And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced / As though the sun took step of thee yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,— / Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!_ ” he recited.

Tony leaned against the counter. “I have no idea what that means,” he admitted. “It sounds nice, though.”

“It’s about America,” Steve said firmly.

“Oh my god,” Bucky groaned. “Now he won’t stop. You’ve created a monster, Stark.”

“Of course it’s about America.” Tony grinned.

“And creating our own American myths, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s about optimism, and cities and urban life, especially New York, and forces of capitalism and—”

“It’s about Crane’s boyfriend who’s away at sea and how he’s looking for some fresh blood,” Bucky said, leaning his chair back on two legs and making a toothy smirk at Steve. Steve grabbed a marshmallow from Bucky’s bowl and flung it at his head.

“Wow,” Tony said, cradling his now full mug of coffee against his chest and ducking his nose into the rising steam. “That’s some heavy shit for dead-ass in the morning. I’ll have to check it out when I’ve slept. Slept more, sleeping fully might never happen.” He stepped toward the door with a little wave. “Catch you later, Supermen.”

Steve’s eyes trailed after Tony, then lingered on the door he’d walked out of. When he looked back at Bucky, he had a lopsided grin on his face. “What,” Steve said.

“How long’s that been going on?”

“Nothing’s going on,” Steve said, moving his spoon around the dregs of his own cereal.

“You want there to be something though, right?”

“Remind me why I spent so much time wishing you were here?”

“So you wouldn’t be the only one in this godforsaken tower who remembers when there were sheep in Central Park and what a banana’s supposed to taste like,” Bucky offered, his tone matter-of-fact.

“Yeah, something like that,” Steve groused. “What about you? You got your eye on anyone?”

Bucky clicked his tongue. “Of course I’ve got my eye on someone. Your teammates are practically supermodels.”

“They could be your teammates, too,” Steve said slowly.

Bucky just smiled. “I dunno if I’m ready to do more than have my eye on a person, though.”

“So when Natasha said she knew you from—”

“I tell you what,” Bucky interrupted. “We’re gonna go play that stupid racing game Barton likes on that giant-ass screen in your living room. If you beat me, I’ll tell you anything you like about me and Natasha.”

“Deal.”

“Sucker, I didn’t even say what you’d have to tell me if I win.” Bucky stood and carried his dishes to the dishwasher.  

Steve won the first time they played, but Bucky insisted on best two out of three, which rapidly turned into three out of five, then five out of seven. It was well into the afternoon and they’d played 10 games and stopped once for pizza by the time Bucky did win. It turned out he just wanted ammo for making fun of Sam, which Steve was happy to provide. Clint arrived in the middle of it with an oversized bottle of prosecco and gleefully joined in. Steve soon realized that Bucky must have sent out a text, because Sam and Natasha showed up with tequila soon after and insisted on having a racing tournament. He’d run out of surprise by the time Thor, Tony, Bruce, Jane, and Darcy came in carrying bags of limes to make margaritas and take-out boxes of poutine.

Steve certainly hadn’t imagined ending up in the 21st century with a band of superheroes and scientists, spending most of a day simulating car crashes on a giant television screen in his living room, but he figured it wasn’t a bad way to live.

 

_________

 

Dear Bucky,

 

I wish you—the one I remember from ’45—could see what you’re like now. Even back then it seemed like sometimes you never thought you’d be happy again. I thought it was because you believed the war would never end, but now I think it was because of Zola and because you never stopped worrying about me and all the trouble I was getting into.

But you’re happy now, sometimes. Yesterday you went shopping with Darcy and Clint and came back wearing the most ridiculous sunglasses with glitter all over them and these tight skinny jeans. You and Darcy had come up with some song about how they made your ass look, which you treated us to several times over dinner.

And last week you and Sam and Colonel Rhodes all came out on a mission with us. I thought Tony wouldn’t shut up over comms, but you and Sam are something else. And then you and Clint got into a competition about who could shoot down the most robots and roped Thor into keeping score, and when you won—or so you claimed, Clint still contests the results—you convinced Thor that this ridiculous elbow slapping thing you did was a Midgardian victory ritual like a high-five or a fist-bump. He kept trying to get me to do it with him for days until finally Jane caved in and told me he knew it was a joke and just wanted to fuck with me.

So you’re still a little punk, but I see you smile almost every day, so I think it’s alright.

I don’t even really miss the old you any more.

 

Steve

 

_________

 

Steve carefully dabbed glue onto the back of the photo corner, then slipped it over the last corner of the photo, not letting the sound of approaching footsteps break his concentration.

“So the scrapbooking rumors are true,” came Tony’s voice over Steve’s shoulder. “I wasn’t sure if Sam was fucking with me or not.”

“We’re _all_ fucking with you, Tony,” Steve assured him. “I have four different kinds of glue and a collection of washi tape as part of an elaborate prank.”

“Mind if I keep you company for a bit?” Tony asked, already pulling out the closest chair. Steve had picked this dining room because it had the biggest table—it could probably seat twenty people easily—but he wasn’t surprised when Tony sat down right next to him.

“Prank would be pretty pointless without you here to witness it,” Steve replied.

“So this is the stuff that was in that tin box?” Tony picked up a newspaper clipping, careful to balance it by the outside edges instead of pressing the flats of his fingers against the surface.

“There’s some new stuff, too. You didn’t look when you dug it up?”

Tony shrugged. “Only to verify I had the right box. Why’d you save this one?”

Steve glanced at the clipping. “My mom saved that, actually. There were recipes in the paper sometimes, and she kept the ones she wanted to try again.”

Tony reached for the partially bound stack of papers in front of him. “Is that a candle?”

“Mm-hmm.” Steve added the next photo corner to the picture he was working on. “It’s from shabbat with my friend Arnie.”

“This is him too, right?” Tony angled a page toward him. It was the printout of the photo that had been in the papers when Arnie and Michael had married. Steve nodded. Tony turned the page. “And that’s a shit-ton of matchbooks.”

Steve chuckled. “Yeah, they used to have them everywhere. Some of those are just designs I liked. There were some really clever ones.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Tony bent down and squinted at one of them. “Are these matches shaped like beer bottles? That’s crazy. And these ones are people—this is brilliant advertising, why don’t we do this anymore?”

“Lung cancer?” Steve suggested.

Tony turned another page. “I would've expected more baseball tickets.”

“I couldn’t afford to go too often. But there’s some new ones in that pile.” Steve indicated it with his elbow, his hands still occupied with the photo before him.

Tony gently pushed the stack of pages in front of him off to one side and pulled the other closer. “Yeah, wow, did you save stubs from _every_ game you and Clint have been to?”

“Everyone needs a hobby.”

“How is this organized, anyway?”

“Bold of you to assume it’s organized at all.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “C’mon, I’ve met you. You alphabetize the spices in the kitchen cabinets.”

Steve elbowed him. “How else are you supposed to find them? And those pages are games and things. See, that’s a cowrie shell from that game Bruce taught us.” In another stack were mementos from Brighton Beach with Nat, playing tourist with Thor, and readings with Bruce, alongside recipes from team dinners, photos of Sam playing pool, a rubbing of Mjolnir, a muddy Hulk handprint, the abstract of Jane’s latest paper. He liked seeing the pages from his new life side-by-side with the ones from his old life, a reminder that they were both real, both a part of him.

“Oh I recognize this one, this is from when Clint got tired of your Monopoly-is-anti-capitalist rant.” Tony chuckled.

“There’ll be more of that once I figure out how to attach a marble to a piece of paper.”

“Marbles, huh? I thought that was just an old-person cliche.”

“Yeah, I actually bought the marbles at the dollar store solely to complete my old-man aesthetic.”

“So how do you attach a marble to a piece of paper?”

Steve glanced sidelong at Tony. “That was a joke.”

“Doesn’t have to be. You could get some kind of light wood, or maybe a flexible silicone—that would be better, so you could turn it, like paper—the same size as the paper, but a little deeper than the marble’s diameter, hinge it so it turns like a page, and then dig out a spot for the marble. Cover it with a little bit of that clear plastic stuff you have and bam. Marble 3d scrapbooking accomplished.”

“Did you just turn my incredibly lame, entirely analog hobby into an engineering project?” Steve watched Tony’s sheepish smile transform into a wry one. It would work, was the thing, and Steve was more excited to try it than he probably should be. The cowrie shell and the shabbos candle were already digging ugly dents into the opposite pages that he needed to do something about sooner than later. He was already thinking of how to use the same concept for other pieces he’d saved, like the buttons he’d kept from an old coat, and the eyes from a teddy bear whose fabric parts had disintegrated years before even Rebirth.

“Not sorry,” Tony said, flipping over the page with the Monopoly money. “Wow, you go to the Met a _lot_.”

Steve looked at the page covered in the little enamel pins that visitors were given to show they’d paid an entrance fee. He didn’t mention that more than half of those had been from times he’d gone there with Tony. “I’m trying to get all the colors. There are 16, but I just get the dark blue ones over and over again.”

“Is this my handwriting?”

Steve pursed his lips and dared a look at the page Tony had just turned to. Yeah, it had happened. Steve really should have seen it coming. Of course Tony had found the section dedicated to, well, Tony. Pressed to the page with double-sided mounting squares was the ragged edge of the note Tony had left the night he’d let Steve talk his ear off about his childhood and the Brooklyn Bridge. _Thanks for the company. Sweet dreams._

“Yeah,” Steve said after what was probably too long. The ticket from the MoMa print show Tony had taken him to was there too, between a postcard from Stormking Art Center and a paper menu he’d snagged at a bizarre dessert pizza restaurant they’d visited together. In the next row was a coaster from a brewery they’d been to, a postcard of the ’64 World’s Fair, a ticket from the science museum in Queens where they’d ended up back in October, a drawing of Manhattan at night as viewed from the arms of a flying Iron Man suit.

Tony ran a finger over the gaps between where bits of paper were adhered to the page. This one was dedicated to a day trip they’d taken to Dia: Beacon. If they’d driven straight there it would have taken them less than two hours to reach it, but they hadn’t taken a direct route, and the page bore the fruits of that. Among the postcards and sketches from the museum was a label from a jar of jam Steve had bought at a farmers market near Tomkins Cove, pressed leaves from Bear Mountain State Park, and the bottlecap of a strange cucumber-flavored soda they’d found at a rest stop along the Palisades that Steve hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. The drive back had been even more circuitous—they’d driven half an hour north so Steve could visit Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s house and the accompanying museum. After that, they’d stayed on the east side of the Hudson River, and Tony had just driven—taking turns on whims, winding along rural roads and over hillsides that reminded Steve of the Italian countryside. They’d argued over what music to play until JARVIS had been put in charge of picking, stopped in Peekskill for coffee, and then bickered about who would drive the rest of the way back to the city, Tony complaining the whole time Steve was at the wheel and demanding they switch before they hit Yonkers. It was one of the best days Steve could remember in his whole life.

“Steve,” Tony said after a moment. They weren’t sitting quite close enough to touch, but Steve could feel the reverberations across the floor from Tony’s knee bouncing up and down beside him. “Are we dating?”

Steve inhaled sharply. The photo of the building where Steve had grown up lay forgotten on the pile of paper and photo corners in front of him; Tony had all of his attention now. “Well—”

Tony’s eyes grew wide, and they were just inches from Steve’s own. “What the hell, how long have we been dating? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We don’t have to be, I mean—”

“What, are you saying you don’t want to? Because that’s what _I_ thought, but your scrapbook begs to differ, babe.”

“What—why would you think I didn’t want to? And ‘babe,’ what’s that about?”

Tony grinned and scooted his chair closer to Steve’s so their thighs were pressed together. “Well, at first it was because I thought you were Captain America. Fortunately I figured out that you just play him occasionally in battle situations. And oh yeah, by the way, I didn’t even know you liked men. I was working from incomplete data, okay. After I knew you did, I figured you were wildly out of my league. And if we’re dating, you’re going to have to get used to pet names.”

Steve realized he was smiling widely and goofily and wasn’t sure when that had happened. He didn’t really care, because Tony had just said something so wonderful that parts of his brain were still working to catch up. “Yeah? What else am I going to have to get used to?”

“This,” Tony said. He grabbed Steve’s face and kissed him.

It was, by Steve’s estimation, a very good kiss. He was at a point where he’d have taken anything that let him feel Tony’s beard against his skin and get his hands in the soft tangle of Tony’s hair, so his standards were admittedly not high, but it was even better than he'd imagined. It was, like so many things about Tony, more than the sum of its parts: the rush of sensory input from tasting and smelling and feeling Tony’s lips and tongue; the way Steve got to rest his hand on the small of Tony’s back; how Tony pressed against him, closer than he’d ever been before but still tantalizingly not close enough.

“Yeah,” Steve said when they pulled apart, watching Tony’s eyes glitter. “I can get used to that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me [on Tumblr](http://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/). [Tumblr post for this fic here](https://dirigibleplumbing.tumblr.com/post/176029992892/i-am-with-you-dirigibleplumbing-the-avengers).
> 
> Arnie Roth is inspired by the character of the same name in the 616 comics, where he’s Steve’s childhood friend instead of Bucky. Arnie is canonically Jewish and queer.
> 
> In the comics, Steve worked as an artist for the WPA before Rebirth. 
> 
> [Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45470/crossing-brooklyn-ferry) (See also [this illustrated version](http://bam150years.blogspot.com/2017/09/i-am-with-you-crossing-brooklyn-ferry.html))
> 
>  
> 
> [Excerpt from Crane’s “The Bridge”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43262/the-bridge-to-brooklyn-bridge)
> 
>  
> 
> The resources I used the most were: [Ephemeral New York](https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/); [Steve Rogers Is Historically Accurate](https://historicallyaccuratesteve.tumblr.com/); [Steve Rogers’ New York](https://steve-rogers-new-york.tumblr.com/); and [this beloved Steve meta](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/10/steven-attewell-steve-rogers-isnt-just-any-hero).
> 
> Also. On the timeline of the fic vs. the official MCU timeline. Like… the official MCU timeline puts events of _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ in January of 2014 and…does that movie look like it happens during an East Coast winter to you? Yeah the average temperature in January there is apparently 25F to 45F (that’s approximately -4C to 7C). I don’t think there would be [green grass and leaves on the trees and regular people wearing hoodies and shorts with no coats or hats](http://agentpalmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Steve-Rogers-meets-Sam-Wilson.jpg). So! Everything happens basically the same in this fic as it does in that movie except it’s also cold and wintry outside because it’s goddam January in DC, just a different year than the official timeline.


End file.
